Everything that is written down is a fact.
It has collective substance. It doesn’t just exist for me, but for everyone that is able to put these symbols together. And that is the only thing that gives it meaning.
If I wrote the most beautiful poem or a new Marx piece, but it was written in a language that only I spoke.
Would it even exist?
It wouldn’t matter that’s for sure, but would it have substance?
The only thing that makes us humans cooperate together is that we have a shared way of communicating. We can know whole countries exist without ever visiting them, because someone wrote it down and gave us that information.
We can make decisions upon that information and seal them on paper.
History, medicine, movies. They exist because we found a way to document and share information through which we can work together and make new decisions.
Documented and written down information used to be holy.
We used to think about what thought was worth documenting. We didn’t just throw everything on paper and send it out.
We don’t have that kind of reassurance anymore. Everything is information today. There is so much of it that we use it as entertainment.
So much of it that we are not aware of the biggest information, because there is just too much of it and everything seems equally as important.
However, in reality it isn’t. Today we are aware or at least could be aware of every little detail that happens in this world. We can know how many robberies happened in Venezuela today even though I am sitting in Vienna. I can know how many children were born today in Chile and at the same time how many people died.
There is so much we could know, and everything seems important and we haven’t developed a selective perception for news yet. At least none that is beneficial for us.
Everything is just crashing into us without a break.
And of course, we feel demobilized. How wouldn’t we?
All these events are happening, and I could be fully aware of them, however it doesn’t feel like I could change it. With those huge amounts of data, a name in the long long list of deaths in a war becomes just a data point and not a story.
Through those huge amounts of data, the important ones get left behind because maybe there is something bigger to focus on.
The world is so caught up in information that it has forgotten that its purpose was not to spread it but make it better and develop through it. The news of climate change has just become a daily morning show segment where we can learn what meat to eat to do our part to stop it. So that we feel like something is happening and other people are doing the work, when in reality we would need much more than that.