Living, For Better or Worse, in the Minutiae Culture

By Daniel Dessinger

May 12, 2008

My week last week was pretty typical. The day starts early, I eat breakfast, study, think about blog articles, and so on. Of course, while I'm doing this, I'm also simultaneously twittering, messaging, responding to email, watching my RSS feed for the latest buzz, discovering new music, and reading articles on every conceivable topic. I'm hyped up on news, I'm an infophile, what can I say?

The tech culture and blog culture in particular demands that you be on the razors edge if you want to keep up. But what is the result of following all this minutiae? What is the price we pay for our semi-omniscience? These are some of the questions that I have been asking myself this weekend.

We live in a time unlike any other. Today there is more information at our fingertips than we could ever possibly absorb, with more and more of the stuff being created every day at a furious rate. The floodgate has been opened, and now it’s not only the academia and the published author who can make their mark on the face of society, but you and I.

All of this increased access leads inevitably to an increased interest in the minutia of life. We now have the ability to dig very deeply into very specific topics, and then to dig even deeper. What ramifications does this increasingly microscopic view have on our ability to connect with the big issues? I want to share with you some results of this mindset that I see at work in our culture already. The first thing I would like to bring to your attention is our shrinking attention span.

We flit from one trend to the next, rarely sticking with anything for long. We channel surf so fast that the blurring light could induce seizures, and we get impatient when our fast food isn’t prepared by the time we finish paying. This continual need to be stimulated is ruining our ability to really delve into the issues of our time.

As a culture, we’re losing the ability to look inward, and to remember what we see. We’re too busy reacting to the latest fad. Another detrimental effect of this minutia culture is that we seem to be losing touch with each other. We have dug ourselves so deeply into our sub subcultures that we are splintering along hundreds of thousands of cultural fault lines.

It used to be in school the nerds didn’t hang out with the jocks. Now the nerds don’t hang out with the jocks, the preps, the Goths, the Skaters, or the punk kids. So each successive generation appears to be self isolating into an ever more specific subculture. Within that subculture, everyone agrees with everyone else’s view of the world. If history tells us anything, it’s that intelligent debate is what makes individuals and societies great, not universal agreement.

All of this postulation is not to say that we should limit technology, or that our ability to have so much knowledge access is a bad thing. It is not. It’s a fantastic thing, and this increasing access to information and data will absolutely change the face of our planet. These thoughts are merely meant to encourage us all to think about the power that such a culture has to shape us. We need to be the conscious directors of our destiny, not allowing information overload to shape us into isolated, over stimulated individuals, but instead using information to forge a future beyond belief.