Too many options dilute shared experience
Too many options dilute shared experience: Our community is fragmented because we don’t do things together the way we used to.
(Via Christian Science Monitor.)
A few weeks ago I was discussing with a friend how the Olympics didn’t really seem like a big deal anymore. Certainly, I hadn’t watched any of the coverage. But in a lot of ways this was really disappointing. When I was growing up in the early 80s, if the Olympics were on, everyone was watching.
Now this isn’t all a bad thing. The fragmentation of today’s media have allowed for some truly worthwhile work to be done that otherwise wouldn’t have been made. Tiny niches never filled before can be filled now. And these are all Good Things.
But the share experiences the article talks about seem to be missing somewhat. Or rather, they aren’t as shared as they used to be. A lot of my friends are heavily involved in the Internet, and collectively we tend to know about the latest Internet memes. We can discuss them and laugh about them together. But my parents rarely, if ever, do. However, there are different shared events that we have, that we can discuss and laugh over.
It’s not that shared experience is disappearing. It’s that it’s Balkanizing at the same rate as the media. Rather than all sharing in one of a few shared communities of interest, we now participate in dozens, communities that are more reflective of our varied personalities and various aspects of those personalities. So maybe this isn’t such a terrible thing.
I still miss the Olympics, though.
