So how do you think our Society and Culture is doing so far? I’m talking about human civilization. Are people any nicer to each other today September 15th, 2009 than they were a thousand years ago? Has our political systems improved and is technology making us any happier? We still work jobs like we’ve done for millenia. But now there are jobs that are simply easier on the bones than jobs even a few hundred years ago. I was reading on Craiglist and there were opportunities for people to work as extras on the set of movie productions for 100-300 dollars per day. That’s not too bad if you’re looking for work. Getting paid daily in this economy isn’t a terrible alternative to unemployment. I guess what I’m getting at is, does our culture have a sense of purpose? Are we actually going anywhere? When I was young I was always impressed by the idea of space travel and science fiction. I expected that we would have had a manned mission to Mars or an outpost on the Moon by now. But instead our media is constantly focusing on the negatives of our civilization. Yes, there is crime and corruption and terrorism that causes problems for our society but none of those things are stopping us from eating dinner. Nobody in America seems to be going hungry and the world population continues to rise.
So what’s really stopping humanity from achieving its dreams? I think one major problem is that our Culture doesn’t have any collective dreams right now. There’s no current objective for our media/political system/education sytem for our people to focus on. Simply getting rich and/or surviving isn’t enough to call a “dream.” This is in part a problem with the very nature of the United States of America in it’s current form. You see, America’s political system is set up to put out fires. I mean problems arise and the government tries to handle them as best as it can, usually under the control of special interest groups and lobbying interests. But there have been examples of when there has been a sense of unity in The United States of America. These times include World War II and other major conflicts, but there has been examples of movements like hippies and hipsters in this country that helped give everyday people a sense of identity. Do Americans have identity anymore? Or are we just consumers trying to make the best of a tattered economy? I think we can do better than this for this generation.
In fact, we can utilize all this amazing technology in order to change what our media/culture is gazing at. Ever wonder why people talk about stuff at work or with each other? I mean, last night my Mom started talking to me about Mr. West and how he made a foolio of himself at the VMA awards. A day before this a friend from Northern California brought up the same point while we were playing a game of Heroes of Newerth. I’m bringing this up because everyone seems to be looking at the same stuff all the time. The same news is regurgitated and the same negativity is multiplied. The AP or Associated Press seems to be the largest contributor of online news information and people read it barf it onto each other and more useless information gets spread. There has to be a better way of utilizing all this technology in order to make people feel confident and hopeful and ready to rock instead of afraid and worried all the time. What about if we could vote online or have google maps that showed crime rates in real time? I think if people actually looked at statistics they’d see that the outside world isn’t half as dangerous and negative as it is portrayed by the media if they just used their brains and a little bit of street smarts.
Do we want a new type of iPhone or do we want better batteries? Batteries would be a key area of invention if we focused on them more because they enable us to be more mobile. There is plenty of fuel on this planet to power cities, the trick is storing that energy. Speaking of technology, has anybody else noticed that Computer Hardware isn’t advancing as fast as it used to anymore? I was talking with the owner of a great place where I get my computers fixed called Device Repair and he said that programming is getting more advanced but the actual hardware is not rapidly evolving. This is probably because there are less people studying the required prerequisite knowledge areas of science in order to push the technology along. I know I had trouble with math myself in High School and College. Does this say something about our education system? I think so. We need more Math and Science in school and we need teachers that can speak english properly so kids can understand them. I remember taking pre-calculus at UCSB and I couldn’t even understand the professor at all. I felt like I was left alone with a book that I didn’t understand and that made me feel a lot less confident about myself because I was so used to learning things quite rapidly.
I guess this is part of the problem, people are too used for things to come easily that we’ve gotten away from grinding towards larger goals. It’s almost like this Economy is a big excuse for why we aren’t united as a people toward some larger goal. Think about it. We have 304 million people in the USA. If we just had a small fraction of those people focusing on something like making cities run more efficiently, space travel, new batteries or political efficiency then we would see rapid growth. But instead we have small pockets of people working on important things. Did you know that in 2006 only about 17 thousand people were working for NASA. That’s a really small number for such an important part of our civilization. It just goes to show that we aren’t pushing ourselves to face the next big challenges. I want to apply for a job on the moon or Mars or something! That would be like being a part of the founding colonies of America back when Jamestown was established. Think about the opportunities that would arise for motivated people that were willing to work on a huge mining base on Mars!
Check out www.overidon.com for more on modern Earth Culture.