Are You Part of the "Information Caste" System

 I have been reading articles that suggest that, as you get older, you become a "technophobe" - someone who dislikes technology.  Certainly for some people this is true - you see ads on TV for cell phones for older people that don't have all the whiz-bang nonsense attached - just a plain old cell phone with big numbers.

I think that older people are less likely to buy things like HD TV, use computers and so on as well.

But I think that just saying its because of age is disingenuous.

Older people I know - in their 60's, 70's and 80's - tend to have other justifications or reasons as well.  For example, I have an older aunt in her eighties that just had her cable TV removed and replaced with a regular TV antenna (and a new digital coverter box).  Why?  Because the cable TV removed the local public TV stations.

A lot of older people I know also still have only regular TV's connected to antennas.  They "don't need" all the channels of cable.

So what does this say?  For one thing, I think, people in this mindset are missing out on the world around them.  Today there is much less information presented on "regular TV" - its more distributed on the internet, cable TV, and so on. 

I think this is a key point.

The world is much more complex than the world I grew up in, and that world, with space rockets, satellites, and trips to the moon, was far more complex than the world my parents grew up in.  My great grandmother was born before 1900 and lived on a farm with a horse drawn cart, no running water, no electricity or phone, and so on.

I think that the world has progressed in a fashion which requires you to consume more information just to keep abreast of what's going on.  The internet or cable TV are conduits for this information and if you eliminate them from consideration you get much different and, I think, much less information. 

In the old days Walter Cronkite summarized the state of the world in 30 minutes for many of the people in the country.  Today, there is is too much information for this to occur - yet people cling to this old format.

What's interesting is what gets left off if I watch, say, only the 30 or 60 minutes of nightly news?

I think a lot - in fact - a dangerous, or perhaps, an irresponsible amount.

With all of the conduits for information available you now see in places like the middle east things such as Facebook being used to conduct whole sale revolution within a country like Egypt.

How do you explain to someone who does not know what Facebook is what is going on?

Similarly I have written about copyright "trolls" and how they are changing the face of society - how do you explain this to someone who does not understand the internet or what it does?

You also have to wonder how people without this kind of information can make informed decisions.

I think the problem is is that they cannot make informed decisions - for example - when they vote or serve on a jury in all but the simplest cases.

And that's troubling.

Of course, there is a flip side to this coin.  The younger generation, constantly assaulted by video, text and other "streaming" or "push" content from the clouds and beyond, has I think too much information.  Much of what they see is irrelevant to the state of the world in any responsible sense - does it really matter what Lady Gaga is wearing today?

To this generation most bits of information fall like rain drops on an umbrella - scattering around on the floor beside them - lost to their perception.  Whether important or not.

And this new generation is sadly subjected to informational content mixed with a high percentage of ad content - how do they know the difference?  Can they even tell what's an ad and what's a hard fact?

In my experience they cannot.

What's needed is a model for sorting information - what's relevant to me, my future, my child, and so on from whatever else there is - either having too much (in the case of the young) or having too little (by choice of the old).

Without this our society will simply be overrun with information - good, bad and indifferent.

It will create classes of people who, by choice or chance, will have their lives dictated by what stratum of information they live in - those with no input, with commercial input, with mobile input, and so on.  These classes of people will not be able to comprehend what the other class is thinking because they will not have the shared experience or the tools to process it.

So, like the caste system of India, your life and future will be dictated by the "information caste" in which you live.

When you think about it there is very little mobility between castes in this system - few older people, for example, devouring technology and few young people shunning it (know any younger kids that watch only the big three network stations, only have a dial phone, and only listen to the radio?)

And, given this limitation on what type of information you "see" on a day-to-day basis, how is your thinking limited...??