Have you ever gone to a smorgasbord where all your favorite foods were gathered together, and they looked so good, and you ate so much that you ended up uncomfortably stuffed? And by "uncomfortably stuffed" I mean that you felt as if your leather belt was about to burst, sending buckle shrapnel all over the restaurant about two seconds after you shoved that last bite of chocolate cream pie into your chocolate cream pie hole?
These days, all of us seem to be uncomfortably stuffed with information. We keep filling up our plates with SportsCenter highlights, breaking news, the latest analysis, and the Internet; we fill it up with e-mails, Facebook posts, tweets, and blogs. And we can do it all on the go, from a million "aps" on our mobile phones. Rarely do we give ourselves time to digest what we have consumed before we start wolfing down the next morsel of information.
It seems to me that we are killing ourselves with such gluttony. We weren't designed to process this much information and so we are losing our ability to distinguish the important from the ridiculous, the meaningful from the empty, the poetic from the pretentious. Make no mistake: Words create reality and we are creating a reality for ourselves in which Love, Self, Right, Moral, Loyal, Patriotic, Justice and a whole host of other truths mean nothing because they are uttered constantly and with no concern for their meaning or context. The mere act of communicating has become the communication itself.
We have far greater means of communication and far less to say to one another than ever before. Just empty conversational calories. We must back away from the information buffet and put ourselves on a diet of a few sincere words, a face-to-face conversation, a shared experience for which words are not necessary. Maybe if we get ourselves in informational shape, we'll then be able to truly Love, to intimately know our Selves, to do Right, to be Moral, to stay Loyal, to demonstrate Patriotism, and to act Justly. Otherwise, there will be no information on how to save us from ourselves.
Amen, Austin. Where is it going to end? How did we live before this information overload?
Posted by: Nick | September 13, 2010 at 11:19 AM