There is this term in sociology called anomie. Here’s a definition from out there in web-land. Note the rather interesting defining terms…
social instability… alienation…
I think that the same happens when technology gets ahead of society in some way or other. I’ll call this technomie. We’ve all experienced technomie when buying any fancy doodad. The doodad we perhaps read about, studied on, decided was worth the investment is actually a second generation doodad. The new doodads have bluetooth and firewire capability and you can buy a neural link so it sync’s up with you at your most basic.
But the real thing here is we have no real way to keep up. We can only process so much information in a day. There are only so many waking hours, times to read, study, and find. When we go over that limit, technomie sets in. We feel despondent, we lack a focus. Technology is rushing by and the doodads cannot be researched quickly enough to make a difference. Anthropologists perhaps saw this happening in prehistoric technologies when a rapid introduction of new technology occurred. Perhaps when a new stone material was found or when suddenly trade and commerce happened and social/technological/ecological vistas were lifted. But can people adapt all that fast? What is our adaptation rate to new technology? Are we simply limited by the total amount of information we can digest in a day? Sure we can digest a lot, but does that mean we grok it? I don’t think so.
Blogging services offer views of the blogs in the millions these days and there is an explosion of use. One can read just about any blog, on any topic, find what interests that writer; in a blink of an eye. Its too easy to find the authoritative bloggers. But there is a long tail out there. I contend that long tail has more vision, more compelling stories, more ideas than any one or two of the so-called authorities in blogging. Perhaps in the end it will not be links that form how important a person is. Instead we will qualify that person based on the quality of his/her work. We will not inspect in and out links as a measure but we will look at the ideas.
Face it. With blogging we have technomie on a large scale. We have information and we can access it. Can we truly grok it or do we just aimlessly spin our wheels, casting about for answers. The answer is the answer is too big. It needs to be cut into pieces we all can digest. Then technomie will go away. But if you don’t blog for those classic reasons like wanting readership; it can be different for you. Readers may find you out and read for the reasons I elicited and explicated above. Not because of some authority listing; but instead because of the quality.
Technomie will always be with us. Technology moves way too quick.
