Brief revisit to Online and Mobile Technology

In class we talked about how the future of literature will be vastly different from how it is now, and enormously different from how it used to be a hundred years ago. When we read Gergen's "Social Population and the Populated Self", we contemplated WHY people are so interested in celebrity gossip, when such information really has no direct effect on their lives. This is actually kind of interesting, really. Do the every-day scandals of celebrities add a sense of excitement and thrill that we seem to be lacking in our own lives? Possibly. Then again, it's always been a fundamental part of human nature to gossip anyway. People love gossiping, but (as I read in an article about gossiping sometime earlier), gossip isn't always negative. There's positive gossip too, that can really boost a person's reputation or make them be seen in a more positive light.

Anyway, I got sidetracked from my first point about the future of literature. I brought up Gergen because, as we established, people love to read about celebrity gossip. They may not like reading books, almanacs, or encyclopedias, but they still love reading nonetheless. People aren't reading in an educational capacity (as much) anymore, but they are STILL reading...be they celebrity tabloids, or stuff on the internet...people are now generally reading what they WANT to read, and the internet has afforded us an unlimited amount of ways to do just this. You can google any topic you can possibly think of and find sites upon sites about that one topic. And all at the convenient click of a button. You don't even have to get up and drive your car to the library anymore. You can practically sit back, relax, and veg out while scanning articles about how this or that works, about music and movies, and all that stuff. So in a sense, the internet is certainly educating people about things...and people are learning. But maybe not about geography, or politics, or government, or science, or math...all that "academic" stuff. I used to have an English teacher in high school who knew countless kinds of trivia...she said she was a "library of useless information", all because she spent so much time on the internet looking up things people thought were inconsequential.