Both socially and intellectually, we are becoming apathetic. As all our activities become easier and more, convenient, our pursuits are losing their significance.

It’s simple: it’s too easy to do things these days, we don't appreciate it. Remember when your dad would say, "shovel the walkway, it builds character" I am starting to believe that he was on to something.

Take for example the Wikipedia: When in the midst of a debate with a friend, when I need to know the who was elected in 1966 in Bolivia, I can simply, hit the top corner of my browser and punch in "Bolivia+Politics" in to my Wikipedia Search engine, and I have all the ammo needed to settle my debate. 5 seconds.

Back in "the day" I would have had to look that up in a BOOK, and even further before that, I would have had to hunt someone down who was an expert in the field. What a pain in the ass.

Well maybe, but that provides something that a 5 second search result cannot: CONTEXT. And with context comes relevance, understanding, appreciation, and ultimately significance. By reading through pages, or tracking down and talking to an expert (an even more foreign concept), you learn many more things, that would contribute to a web of understanding, instead of an insignificant bit of trivia.

So maybe it would have taken me longer to hunt down that information, but at least I would really understand what I was discussing, and remember it; instead of forgetting it as fast as I was able to access it.

I'm not done yet.

Socially the story isn’t any better. Remember the days, when if we wanted to see someone, we had to leave the house and go visit them…neither do I. Even the phone was okay, because we were able to at least have an animated and dynamic conversation, and at least understand a bit more of their story. And if you didn’t have the time a large chunk of time to invest in calling or visiting a person, or if they were too far, we could write a letter. They took time, showed appreciation, and as such, every word that was written, was valued and contemplated.

But again, with the “advancement” of technology, and the ability to conveniently pound out an email or a web post on our ergonomic keyboards, once again, our pursuits have lost significance.

This time it’s our social pursuit’s significance that has been struck down. With email, myspace, Facebook, LiveJournal, and the plethora of other programs linking billions of people up with dental floss thin relationships connections, social interaction isn’t the same. Just like the proliferation of knowledge on the internet, this change in social dynamics has allowed us to spread out and cover much more ground (per se), but what does that mean. So what if I have 400 friends on Facebook, because, it has made each interaction just like a chore, with many of the mundane attributes of putting out our ‘Glad Easy Tie’ garbage.

So I am not going to stop using the internet for knowledge and social pursuit (and yes I understand the inherent contradiction in this post), but I think I am going to try and do a little better job of writing letters when I want to let my loved ones know how I am doing, and call my grandfather when I want to find out about the great depression, and drop by my friends house, when I want to tell them that I haven’t seen them in ages.

Thanks for reading.