We’re all talking about the same things.
As I catch bits of stranger’s conversations, it is always the same things as my friends and I talk about.
“Did you hear about that stock?”
“Which restaurant dining rules changed today?”
“What did Washington D.C. Man say?”
Everyone, everywhere is talking about the same thing…and most of us don’t realize it.
We all think that WE are having the important, intelligent conversation and that couldn’t be further from reality.
Is it even possible to have an original idea or conversation at this point?
Was it ever possible with mass-media?
And with that, is it even important to have an opinion on hot-topics that mass media propagates?
Obviously, we are more connected than before – that isn’t a new idea.
I’m not old enough to know, but I have a feeling that people used to just talk about whatever was on T.V. or on the front page of the paper.
So I’m not sure much has changed, but the rapidity that we skip from one topic to the next is baffling.
We quickly formulate unsubstantiated opinions and then sprint to the next happening that we need to talk about.
It’s outrageous – we shouldn’t care about most of these topics and these topics are stupifying and a waste of breath.
But we always come back to gossip like this…and I love talking about it once in a while.
The true paradigm that has occurred is that we have transitioned from spending most of our day socializing face-to-face and then retreating to a small bit of media consumption per day.
To now, we spend the majority of our day consuming and a small bit of it talking with others.
So when we do, we are just talking about what we saw online.