Motodisiac

I was watching the Costas Now show on HBO the other day. One of the topics was blogs and sports coverage. And one of Bob Costas’s lines stuck in my memory. “Are we becoming a generation of highlights?”. It was very eloquently put.

This got me thinking. With a huge mass media expansion into our homes in the recent past television and then the internet have come to substitute other sources of information, such as newspapers and books (I believe I’d blogged about a somewhat related subject before). You can compress way more information into a TV segment than on to a newspaper page. It takes more effort to read than to listen. Obviously people get used to this compressed highlight style information delivery. Why would someone take an effort to read a book when all you need is a flat screen TV, beers and a burger to enjoy yourself watching the latest on Britney Spears family troubles or Brad Pitt’s dating habits? I do have a theory on why is that.

In our modern society the ultimate measure of success is money. The wealthier you are more successful you are perceived to be. But what if your line of work is not that financially rewarding? What if you are a world class specialist in something that can’t make you a millionaire? Then our modern society rules that you are not successful. With this said people try to become successful by optimizing their life the way they can make as much money as they possibly can in their lifetime. Now here is the catch - you don’t have to be well rounded and educated say in the matters of world history to become a successful stock exchange broker or a real estate developer. The fact that you can name all Roman emperors or point Mongolia on the map is not going to earn you as much respect as say a 10 million dollar house and a high-end Italian sports car. That is why a lot of people do not even try to get to bottom of things, only highlights. That is why it is easier to learn history by movies such as “Gladiator” and “300″ both of which could not be further away from the actual history.

One of the problems with the highlight style information delivery though is that you can’t effectively convey a complicated controversial piece of news as people no longer see shades of colors so to speak. It is always black and white and good or bad. Lets review the last 60 years of the world’s history. Soviet Union and USA - allies during WW2, enemies during cold war, kind of friends now. So is Soviet Union good or bad, enemy or not? Take Bin Laden. He was a weapons transporter used by the US to deliver weapons to the insurgents during the Soviet invasion to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Fast forward 10 years. Is he still a friend of the US? Our society became so highlight driven that people can no longer understand how these things are possible that your friend is your enemy now and vice versa. Now if you take an effort and read a book on the matter you would probably get to understand the complexity of the problem and hopefully realize that its not only black and white and good or bad in the world. There are shades of that, connotations etc. But why would you want to read a book? A typical representative of the generation of highlights is not interested in reading or having long conversations, they loose interest 2 minutes into it as their attention span is highlight driven. Therefore you get all these people that you can’t even talk to as they loose interest in anything unrelated to superficial stuff they are being fed from mass media.

Generation of highlights is taking over the world. What are you going to do?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Life, Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.