Freedom of Thought

This society is pumping out more and more information to be consumed by the general population. Search engines make all answers a click away; even the deepest philosophical questions are addressed. Now, whenever any sort of information is needed, people can follow the discoveries of others to get their answers. This is a wonderful advancement for society, but it does have some minor side-effects. It’s amazing that there is so much access to the world around us. Societal bonds are broken down by the streams of internet processing, and people are more connected than ever before. It really is a virtual world within our own, destroying boundaries with the comfort of complete anonymity. However, this ease has the tendency to make people lazy or even lethargic in their thought processes. When all the answers are there waiting for you, why think about it for yourself? Instead of trying to explore and discover, Google it for fast and easy answers. What we have learned from Postmodernism, though, is that all retellings of a story are biased through the person telling it. So, when we rely on other’s accounts we are accepting their personal reality as a substitute for our own intuition. Our own thought process has been undermined by unconditionally accepting the biased truth of another. Perhaps Carr is right, “The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as ‘knowledge work’.” It may be streamlining the thought process, but it requires the internet surfer to abdicate any and all personal truths in favor of the truths accepted by strangers. In the future our thought process may be limited to only what we can find on Google.

What does it all mean?

So What Does It All Mean? This question was asked by the video we saw in class after it bombarded us with a slew of statistics meant to astonish us with our insignificance in this rapidly growing world. So much of the world is digitalized and the exponential population growth is contributing to the future users of technology. Our world today barely resembles that of any of the past societies, but is that really a bad thing. The technologies that we marvel at today are no more astonishing to us as electricity and paper was to past generations. We marvel at these technological strides because they are so much more advanced, but we forget to put earlier inventions into context. What we are doing is not at all fundamentally different than what our predecessors were achieving. We are just pushing the boundaries of known science in the same way that Thomas Edison was, and we will continue to do so. The mass of knowledge that is being generated by these technological advances are on the same exponential growth curve that they began with. Sure, The New York Times may give us more information in a day than early man every got in a life time- but the information has just become more accessible. The questions and answers were all there before, but not easy to get too or rely on. Besides, it seems half of the information is tabloid dribble anyway. Yes, there are more people, but we aren’t really doing anything new. We are all just living, reproducing, inventing, and dying. This is nothing new to the human race, although we are doing it on a larger scale. We are just doing the usual, even if the society seems to have ‘evolved’. So, what does it all mean? Nothing much.

Cat's Cradle

There has always been an attempt to make understanding out of the world, to give meanings to things which may or may not in fact have meaning. In science, this has evolved into an ‘art’ called reductionism. Reductionism comes from breaking down things into smaller and smaller parts in order to find something that gives sense to everything that has been broken down. However, this is a never-ending process, because there is always more and more and more to be broken down into. This is the metaphor provided by cat’s cradle as well. No matter how many steps you take in order to break something down, there is always more. The same repetitive motions are taken over and over again, with no outcome at all. The only way to ‘win’ the game is to never start playing it. Postmodernism identifies the lack of meaning in these repetitive motions because all they do is set up the next stage of repetitive motions. The questions asked are meaningless if there are no answers, and as the book said, “such investigations are bound to be incomplete,” (4). Although there is no meaning in the answer, there is meaning in the process. By going through these repetitive motions, happiness can be achieved. The problems arise when people are more focused on the answer than the process of going towards it. Vonnegut states that, “Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either,” (6). Again, the process of belief gives happiness and comfort to whomever it involves whether it is true or not. Postmodernism suggests that we can never know any absolute truths for certain, if there are any absolute truths at all. But, simple belief is not a bad thing if it gives vindications to its believers.