Sitting here on a Sunday evening…the usual internet surfing on the laptop. Have about ten tabs open on my browser (using Chrome these days having just about given up on I.E.).
Absentmindedly click on the tabs sequentially, like flicking through the cable channels.
- There’s my Facebook page.
- Signed out on LinkedIn.
- MNBC reports an Emirates flite dropped suddenly over India, 20 hurt.
- Wikileaks still leading with the Collateral Murder story
- Lead Tweet features the professional rabbit breeder I inexplicably follow, also inexplicably named the_turtle
- Looking up information on Kay Ryan, the US Poet Laureate: Waiting is sustainable, a place of its own harvests
- The bloggers are starting a comment frenzy over Stephen Hawking’s advice that we should not contact alien life. (and am struck that considering what we should do when we meet aliens is now talked about reasonably, without sarcasm or embarrassment. There’s a theory that somehow–intuitively, access to the multiverse, whatever–we develop a sense as a species for what is about to happen and without conscious thought begin to reflect it in our conversations, so that trending topics in forums such as Twitter actually can be used to predict the future.)
- And the Houston Astros are recovering from their horrendous start
It took about 15 seconds to cover those topics. And just for a moment, the slightest tug of transcendence penetrated my consciousness, only to bounce away, like it was frightened by my material nature. The experience of soaring across topics in seconds is without precedence in human history. It’s become so commonplace that we usually lose sight of how shattering it is of our previous experiences and models of human behavior. What I know and am aware of at any given moment dwarfs, I think, what the White House Situation room in its entirety knew in 1960, 1970, 1980.
One of my favorite sayings is:
Quantity has a Quality all of its own.
The quantity of information and connections is changing the quality of the person, the society, and the species. Really, we have no idea of where this will end.
RecoveringFed 