Apathy: Is the Web Breeding It?

I'm from the digital generation, a group of us folks that grew up with the Internet. I'm pretty sure the Internet was in my 9th grade English class. It was a jerk back then, always claiming to be the Information Superhighway. Totally a brat.

The major problem with the Internet nowadays is that it is too quick. We can now access information at such ridiculous speeds that life seems slow. Books are boring, and waiting for more than five minutes is absolutely unacceptable. We are plied with so much information that we become immune to anything but the quickest things.

My generation can no longer take stands that require us to do anything more than write on the Internet. We are outraged that anything more is expected of us. The most active we can necome is logging on and writing about our gripes (myself included). My classmate Bill explains this problem on his blog:

"The point of all this is that I agree that there is a distinction between "old school" and "new school" liberal activists. I wish I still had the energy to man the barricades, because no one from the "new school" has the guts to do anything more than blog away at windmills while our personal freedoms are being whittled down by a bunch of politicos whose main rationale seems to be "aw, shucks" followed by "amen"."

Damn right Bill. The major issue is that most of my generation and below believe we deserve things. Previous generations have paved the way for us to have the freedoms we do, and we are sitting back reveling in that. We should be out defending all of the freedoms we have earned. Instead, we are allowing our president to nominate a supreme court justice who is obviously against most of those freedoms.

Blogging is not activism folks. Daily Kos is not activism. I am not an activist, just a writer who needs to express himself every so often. The cycle of apathy needs to spot before we stop caring about anything but the way mass media controls our life. When I was younger I remember a scene in the Jetson's where George was outraged that he had to push a button at work six times. Are we heading for this type of society?

Yes, I know the irony of complaining about this issue on my blog. But, was Socrates any better when he complained about literature in his written dialogues?