Of Ideas and Perspective

Innate in each of us is a desire to be recognized. Part of that is to be recognized for the things that we create, including our thoughts (assuming it is valid to claim our thoughts are our own creation, which is an argument for another time). The primary means of soliciting this recognition is through communication.

"There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to." -Montaigne

Though this desire to be recognized is the genesis of many human vices, it does have many benefits. For example, it is the invisible hand that promotes the economy of sharing of ideas, which leads to greater understanding and knowledge. Most of everything we know is something we learned from someone else, and the more we share (as a society) the more we know. I believe one of, if not the greatest human invention of all time was the printing press. Before the printing press the sharing of ideas was confined almost exclusively to verbal communication. Books were expensive and hard to duplicate, thus hardly distributed. With the printing press came an exponential growth to the sharing of ideas. Think of the advances in science, medicine, technology, etc. As more and more ideas are shared and studied those ideas can be combined, added upon, and further developed. But is there a limit to the marginal utility of idea sharing? 

In the centuries since the invention of the printing press most of the idea sharing to the masses has come from those deemed worthy by society to share their ideas--usually scholars and professionals--through books and articles. We have now entered a new age of idea sharing with the web and social media; an era where the sharing of an idea with thousands of people, which used to take months or years and costs an arm and a leg, is literally a few keystrokes away, and accessible to almost anyone. But with this increase in idea sharing also comes, I believe, a cumulative decrease in the quality of the ideas shared. I think most of us would agree that after spending an hour or so browsing through our news feed on Facebook or Twitter we come away feeling dumber rather than enlightened. I’ll read thoughts about the country’s economy from someone who obviously knows nothing about the theories of economics, or a repost about some awful thing about some politician from a website that is clearly just trying to push traffic to their page. There is something to be said though about the potential merits of such an increase in idea sharing—perspective.

It is becoming more and more difficult to sift through and discern the ideas worth assimilating and the ones that need to be discarded. It seems that when ideas were few and well established by credible sources there were more accepted universal truths. Truth in the world is now relative with everyone defining it for himself or herself, based on the billions of ideas being shared every day. If there is such a thing as universal truth, is social media leading us farther away from it? Though an increase in idea sharing facilitated by the web may be making it harder to understand truth, it does seem to be expediting and enriching our understanding of something else—each other.