Is Art Limited?

[Hoofhurr]

Exactly. I think the proliferation of recording equipment (because everything anyone does is recorded now) and the distribution capabilities of the internet have lead to an information overload. In the past, you had to really have a passion and drive to have something recorded or written down and those records had to have a high level of demand to stick around. These days it takes little effort to record something and once it's recorded it stays around forever instead of having a natural cycle of decay.

I think this is going to be one of the greatest challenges of our society. Think about the impacts of this. PHD students have to do something original to get their degrees and it's increasingly more challenging to find original research projects, this is particularly true in the liberal arts like we've been discussing. How many times can an English major rethink or recontextualize Shakespeare before it becomes basically plagiaristic? I was speaking with my Dad and he said there's actually a movement in medicine to restructure the MD programs in the country because the increase in the body of knowledge that is medicine has increased so much that medical colleges can barely fit it into a 4 year curriculum. They are thinking about allowing students to specialize right out of pre-med instead of going through gross anatomy and other general knowledge courses.

Projecting this out a little, it seems clear that the rate at which we are adding information to the universe of human knowledge is leading us into an era of hyper-specialization. This is good in the sense that we have more answers to our questions but it is also making us hyper-dependent on other people in our day to day lives. It's exciting and frightening at the same time. Who really polices how we treat each other in day to day transactions? We used to have a strong judeo-christian ethic that you could count on when interacting with people but I think that ethic has really eroded and continues to erode. Internet anonymity is going to be a huge catalyst in this erosion. We rely on total strangers for so much that people used to rely on themselves or friends and family for.

Someone should really write an Orwellian type novel about the dangers of having this huge volume of information. It's so easy to manipulate people because information of any sort is so easy to come by that true or accurate information is washed out in the process. I also think that society can develop ADD exhibiting the same symptoms as an individual human. The truncation of the news cycle is evidence of this.