Changes in Lifestyle – The Information Age

We are well and truly in the information age. We can now order almost anything from the comfort of your own sofa, watch anything anytime from our beds, and find out exactly what our friends are doing all day everyday instantaneously. With the Internet in our hands anywhere, its hard to find the time to make it off of our furniture and actually see the world, when its already at our fingertips.

With the Internet getting faster all the time, information is being consumed more and more. It is already at a extreme rate. Just think back only 25 years. Before the Internet and mobile phones, we got our news threw TV, Radio and Newspapers. These were the only source of new information, other than face to face meeting with another human being. You don’t have to go back much further in the course of human history before we had no common source other than the other people you meet. We have survived millions of years until recently with only the communication of talking in person and learning from another human being.

Is it possible that you could now absorb more knowledge in one week using the Internet, than someone might have in their whole lifetime merely 150 years ago?

But is this a good thing? The problem with having almost limitless information at your fingertips, and the hordes of news and information we now consume every day, is that there is no time to actually take it all in. No time to question the sincerity or the reliability of the source. As soon as you have read it, another story or video or text message is forced into your vision. No one stops to think about what they just read, or what it meant.

All this leads to a sad state of humanity, with opinions almost being caught like a virus, rather than being thought about and agreed. Individuality is quashed by numbers, and the real beauty of experiencing places, people, nearly everything in person is lost.