On Fri, Jan 4, 2019, 3:31 PM Deepa Agashe <[email protected] wrote: > Perhaps I am paranoid, but I worry that a lot of interesting views will be > lost over time because nobody is bothering to expound on them. >
Societal progress optimises for quantity, not quality. Though we can travel half way around the world in 20 hours, we don't often have the interesting adventures or the important reasons to travel as the great travelers - Marco Polo or Hyuen Tsang. Though we have more food choices than an ancient king - any day of the week - on any food delivery app, we rarely remember the meal after a day or two. Even while growing up, wedding banquets in the family were talked about for years. Though all the music in the world is available to stream on our phones, none of the music composed today lasts until tomorrow, let alone hundreds of years. Instant and plentiful love in the Tinder age isn't like the love of old. Most will simply see no reason to march to Lanka to fetch Sita or launch a thousand ships to fetch Helen when you can simply keep swiping. I think one popular site is actually called plenty of fish. In language and literature the kind of fun they had with words in ancient tongues is simply not to be found today. The puns and word play in Sanskrit literature is endless, nearly every Indian epic or religious Sutra has multiple interpretations and profundity unmatched by modern authors. I have no doubt a lot more data will be consumed and generated in times to come, but there will be a lot fewer interesting ideas. Technology allows for harvesting data, searching it, and doing a whole lot of analytics, which lends itself to short bursty communication. No surprise then that Twitter is essentially a bursty packet network. If I want to look up a snippet from a book on my shelf, it's much easier to search the online version. In doing so I miss out on the opportunity to browse and refresh my memory of the book, and make accidental discoveries. However I do get more things done. To arrive at quality has become a conscious choice made only by a few. Societal trends can't provide this. One has to make the conscious sacrifice of time. There's a 16 year old girl who sailed solo around the world recently. There are all sorts of singular achievers who break away from the normative to achieve quality. If one wishes to be the next Marco Polo or Shakespeare there's never been a better time. It's about the choices we make.
