Nowadays it seems like everyone has a blog or some sort of online journal. Many are the traditional “this is what I did today”, and some are actually interesting. Everyone’s got an opinion, and by golly, they’re going to say it!
I find this extremely interesting when looked at in a historical standpoint. You see, for most of mankind’s history the majority of us couldn’t read or write. (And a fair majority of us still can’t, but it’s certainly shifted.) Our history goes a little like this:
- 6,000ish years ago – A kind of standardized written language emerges in Mesopotamia. Only an elite few could read or write. The majority of humans probably lived hand to mouth.
- 200ish years ago – A large percentage of the US population could read, and a select few wrote (by wrote I mean writing for some sort of publicly distributed or shown medium. Newspaper, books, etc.).
- Today – More and more people everyday are becoming writers. The advent of the Internet as broken down the traditional barriers of becoming a writer. We no longer have the elite writers for newspapers or other news outlets.
Don’t you see? We have undergone an incredible change in how our society takes part in the reading and writing relationship. In just a few years we have moved from a system that has very few writers that are picked by editors to one where anyone who wants can spend pretty much nothing and become an Internet celebrity. Blogs have joined the news media whether they wanted to or not. People read them not because they want to get good facts neccessarily, but because they want an opinion or something more interesting than CNN.
It’s a many to many relationship. Many readers, many writers. Here comes the “daily me” where people can pick and choose exactly what we want to read and hear about. We create our world. My version of the world can be quite different than yours.
I forsee a future where we don’t interact with anyone who has a different opinion than us and we have a difficult time doing so if it does happen. We will become so used to surrounding ourselves with everything that agrees with us, we will act like five year olds who get their way all the time. Unable to handle conflict, we retreat.
“The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind, at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
I also think that a good example of intelligence is being able to say you are wrong and change your mind. The ability to use reason. It takes a lot of guts to do it, but if you are able to, it shows true intelligence.
