Today in The Wall Street Journal, Eric Felton summarizes a new book by Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell that has the motto: "Capture everything, discard nothing." Felton explains: "The idea is to use newly available technologies to record every moment of our lives, public and private." With present and future tools, we can retain every experience we've had, every move we've made.
I can think of nothing worse for the teenage psyche. It encourages them in the damaging belief that what happens to them inside and out, every experience they undergo, has a value. It encourages every narcissistic impulse and hinders the process of growing up. After all, one of the acquisitions of maturity is to recognize that 90 percent of what goes on in your head and your life during an average week is of little significance to anybody else. And that's not an unfortunate circumstance. It is the precondition of living happily with others.
The trend will only get worse, though. Elsewhere in the Journal appears a story with the headline, "Twitter's Value Is Set at $1 Billion."
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/All-Me-All-the-Time/8205/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
No comments:
Post a Comment