We need less zeros and more ones

Here is your sign that Wikipedia has gone beyond being the storehouse for all of human knowledge and has now become the resting place for things you didn’t even know existed. Bacon Mania has its own, rather detailed, entry. Not bacon mind you, which certainly deserves a well documented entry, but people’s obsession with bacon. I believe that this marks the inclusion of everything that is ever needed to the internet. I might as well just stop posting. I won’t, of course, but even I’ll admit that it might no longer be necessary from a global enlightenment standpoint.

That is one of the interesting things about the world right now; we really do have all the knowledge on any subject that you would ever need to have right at your fingertips. If I needed song lyrics from a one hit wonder in 1991 I could find them online. If I needed a listing of the match results from an episode of Raw in 1994 I could find them (as well as a full description of the show along with ratings of every single match). Pretty much every piece of information that I could possibly desire is there for me and everyone else in the world.

The thing is I don’t know if that has made us better as people. For one thing, the signal to noise ratio is absolutely horrible. Part of that is the fact that there is so much trivia out there that even I can’t find what is important. Not that I am dissing trivia, as we all know it is pretty much my favorite thing in the world, but it is tough to analyze what is important in life when you know you could read a Thundercats fan page instead. There is just so much information out there that you can’t find what is important. And even then there are so many conflicting opinions that there is no way to judge what is right. That is the confounding thing about Wiki. The entry is simply what the last person who edited it decided it should be. No guarantees on right or wrong. We just all accept what someone else writes as the truth.

That has to sound strange coming from a blogger. All I’ve done for years is sit down and write whatever is on my mind night after night. I always wonder what people from around the world think when they come to this page. To be honest, I can never figure out how they find it in the first place. But even I would consider this blog to be more noise than signal on the grand scheme of things. Sure, I hope that it is funny and informative and at least a great source of free entertainment but I am not providing the secret to enlightenment here. I’m more interested in discussing who Lindsay Lohan is dating at the moment.

And at the end of the day that is the power and the horror of the internet. We create this tool that can change all of civilization and all we do with it is discuss celebrities and post pictures of celebrities taken from angles that are not humanly possible. (Did you see the Jessica Simpson pictures? Was the photographer lying on the ground as Jessica walked over him?) And at the end of the day that is what most of us want to use the internet for. We are not looking to become more advanced or more attuned, we just want to be entertained. Maybe it is the healthy reaction to being faced with all the information that one can ever fathom. There is just so much data, so many nuggets of information that would make your head spin and question your entire world view, that instead of confront it you turn away and focus on gossip. Because we want simple and fluff.

I’m not saying that we should all use the internet to become philosophers. I certainly am not giving up my celebrity gossip sites. I just think that maybe we are all missing something deeper here. Even to the point that it might be better for all of us to unplug and reset for a little bit. Step out of the data stream and refocus.