This past week I had another conversation with a 30-year-old who said he didn’t know who the Beatles were. Well, that’s not exactly true—he’d heard of them, but wasn’t sure he knew any of their songs. I’ve had that conversation a few times before with people of that age or younger. It makes me wonder whether this is just the usual generation gap, or something more profound.
I think back to when I was in my teens and twenties. In addition to listening to hard rock bands like The Who and progressive rock bands like Yes and Pink Floyd—the music of my generation—I also knew crooners like Frank Sinatra from my father’s generation. In fact, I was a big fan of Sinatra. But maybe that was just my own weirdness.
Still, let’s assume there’s something more going on than the ordinary passage of time. “Profound” seems like the operative word here—as in deep. Could it be that younger people have become more superficial? I don’t mean superficial in their values. Our generation was hyper-consumerist; theirs seems far more concerned about the planet than we ever were. By “superficial,” I mean having less of a sense of history. Their world feels more horizontal than vertical. It’s wider, but not as deep. Everything exists on the same plane of meaning.
In 2006, Thomas Friedman wrote a book called "The World Is Flat". In it, he primarily discusses how globalization and the internet were changing the way companies did business. He focuses on the speed and ease with which economies now compete across borders, and how this reshapes flows of capital, information, and immigration, with profound effects on society. Friedman’s view is largely positive. Globalization, he argues, offers opportunities to lift millions out of poverty through education and economic integration. He also suggests there are political benefits, since integrated economies are less likely to go to war with one another.
What Friedman didn’t fully address were the more disruptive social consequences—ones we have since come to know well: cultural backlash, widening inequality, friction around immigration. To be fair, Facebook didn’t exist when the book was published, and even when social media emerged, few anticipated its more corrosive effects.
What we’ve learned in the two decades since is that we’re being flattened in another, even more meaningful way: in our thinking.
Experiencing the world primarily through a screen has a powerful flattening effect. It makes everyone and everything appear equivalent and relative. It diminishes our sensitivity to the dimensionality of others—and even of ourselves. Expressions of vitriol and hatred are stripped of consequence, making them easier to produce and consume. People become more shameless, quicker to judge, and less reflective. This flattening helps explain why intolerance spreads so easily and why conspiracy thinking finds such fertile ground.
The searchable universe of the internet also flattens time. Everything exists in a kind of suspended present, untethered from what came before or what followed after. The sense that one thing grows out of another—that it owes its existence to its predecessors—is weakened. Yet it’s precisely that awareness of connection and lineage that gives us perspective, gratitude, and appreciation.
When I asked my young friend what music he listens to, he did mention a few songs from my era. When I asked how he discovered them, he explained that some of the music he likes samples older songs. His curiosity about the originals led him to look them up online. That, I suppose, is one way of forming a connection with what came before.
My fear is that when life is flattened—when everything is placed on the same level—it ends up devaluing everything equally. Nothing feels more important, more true, or more meaningful than anything else. Cultural and artistic touchstones lose their prominence, not because they lack merit, but because the context that gives them weight has eroded.
Understanding the rich, layered evolution of thought and sensibility is central to our personal development. A flat experience of the world is impoverishing. Without depth, there is no perspective; without perspective, no humility; and without humility, little chance for wisdom. A world that is wide but shallow risks mistaking immediacy for significance, and novelty for meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment