So everyone seems to be up in arms about Net Neutrality which, as I have come to understand it, would allow cable companies to charge more for content that is currently free and allow them the right to slow down connections. All of this in the name of progress and innovation.
The same freedoms we’ve allowed Google by agreeing to its terms and conditions would also be granted to the cable companies, algorithms managing content and advertisements. Now the U.S. has allowed cable companies that same right without even allowing us to agree to the changes ourselves.
Have we reached a crossroads? Has the internet become too much of a burden?
Perhaps, it’s the silver lining we’ve all been waiting for. Email. Facebook. Twitter. News Feeds. Burble, Gurble, & Schloop.com. It may not exist yet, but you never know.
When I was growing up, my mother and father spent maybe 10 minutes a day listening to the president’s accomplishments on the evening news. That was it. Today, every single time the man burps, there’s another tweet.
Connectedness has gone too far. TMI; that is, too much information has reached another level.
Back then it was objective reporting. Just the facts ma’am. None of this subjective stuff, when everyone has to put in their ten cents worth of opinion, while the next hour begins yet another train of gray suits and intelligent women all in the latest styles saying nearly the exact same thing that was said an hour earlier but dressed in a different hairstyle.
It’s absurd.
Absurd is a word that not only wealthy elitists say in order to sound intelligent–that’s absurd–but a word that describes a condition or state of being attributed to a noun; a theatrical movement, a political outcome, a train of thought.
A quick Google search tells me absurd (adj.) means wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate.
We often misuse the word absurd like we misuse the word awesome.
There is no question, we live in absurd times when we rely on television to give us some semblance of reality, when people starving in Yemen and the slow pan on the boy with the swollen stomach makes us change the channel. Too much information. I wonder how many of us had a good night’s sleep while he lie there comatose in the cold night air of the desert.
Few of us, I’ll bet.
And I’m sure many of us may have even changed the channel because we weren’t in the right state of mind to deal with such images at the moment. Instead we changed the channel until we stopped on the bank commercial showing the handsome couple hiking up mountainous terrain, reaching the top in an embrace and smiling that perfect toothy smile.
Now we are happy again. It’s absurd.
A friend of mine once sat across from a homeless man and watched him for two hours. He wanted to know if he could still feel compassion for another human being because he had a feeling he wasn’t responding properly to the horrible atrocities with compassion anymore. He needed to know real feelings again. He felt as if he was asleep despite the fact that he was conscious every minute of the day.
Are we addicted to the messages coming from a distant Elsewhere?
Or is it simply time to disconnect?
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Philoniusthunk 