As the public sphere encroaches and overruns the private sphere, it is necessarily harder to experiment with new tastes, opinions and beliefs, and to settle on certain ones, because the entire process is more transparent for observation and judgment.
These things—devices like Google Glass, which give us immediate access to the web, and social networks, which push us to share more and more of ourselves with the public—are intertwined. The result could be, or already is, a greater emphasis on “Well, everyone else thinks…” and less on “Well, I believe this to be true because…”. And that should be profoundly worrying.
My personal experience with most people: they’d rather believe what other people say rather than come to a conclusion themselves. I tend to do this too sometimes, when other people I assume to have more knowledge than me form an opinion that sounds smarter than anything I could have said myself.
It’s starting to be common in conversations as well, that when someone in a group quotes something from the internet, the belief that “It must be true because it’s from so-and-so,” echoes soon after. But what do we know?
Maybe I can start taking notes of things I’ve read online, things other people have said that I may agree or disagree with. It could be a way to exercise writing in some way. Maybe finally push me to resurrect my blog.
Leave a Reply