Back in the seventies, I read Future
Shock by Alvin Toffler who addressed the challenges of the information
explosion. At that time, it all seemed
theoretical to me and I was not aware of how the bombardment of information would
affect my life. Now, as my husband, Glen
and I sit up in bed late at night with our iPads glowing, we seem to have
difficulty letting go of what is going on and just relax. Before turning out the light, I click on the
Facebook icon just to make sure nothing world shattering has happened to any of
my thousand odd friends. I hear Glen
playing another YouTube video of some band or other, drinking in the music with
great delight. These things are not a
part of our schedule. They are on top of
the daily routine, yet at times, they seem to barge in and try to take
over. Will they become the focus of our
lives, when we are ready to leave our daily occupation and move into the next
phase of our lives?
They are a part of the transition
that our generation is making from a world where life seemed to be orderly and
everything had its place to the information explosion that has turned our world
upside down. Assumptions that seem
certain today, we may call into question tomorrow, as new knowledge surfaces.
Take a concrete example. I observe and compare the way that our daughter
is raising her little girl. In my day,
if we had a question or concern about what was happening to the baby, we had a
few options. If we were extremely anxious,
we would call the paediatrician’s office.
For less significant concerns, we could call our mothers or mothers-in-law,
or even another more experienced mother. If we still were not satisfied, we
looked it up in our baby and childcare books.
When my daughter has a question,
she immediately opens her iPad and Googles her question. There she has a world of experts ready to
help her. It can be a little
intimidating. In addition, there seem to
be theories that become dominant because many experts adopt them. That credibility makes them the accepted way
of doing something. For example: When we were expecting our babies, the
instructors in our pre-natal classes taught us that we were to lay them on
their sides or their stomachs, but never on their backs. They might spit up and choke on it. My daughter was advised in her classes that
the only proper position for your baby to sleep is to be on her back. Her little one survived without incident and
eventually she learned how to turn over and sleep on her stomach; perhaps that
is the best solution. I wonder what instructions
the experts will offer to my granddaughter when it comes time for her to have her
children and she attends her online pre-natal classes.
We find ourselves in the midst of
transition. The boundaries that enclose
what we know in our world have become quite elastic. Some fear that they will stretch so far they
will break. I believe we have little to
fear with the proliferation of knowledge.
Never will the human mind or any of its inventions Never can the human
mind or any of its inventions hope to be able to exploit the Source of all
knowledge. What we need, to go with our
abundance of knowledge, is an increase in wisdom. That comes as we gain an understanding of who
we are, of the significance of our lives, and of our limitations. These enable us to make deliberate choices
about which knowledge will govern our lives.
Wisdom equips us with safe boundaries wherein we can examine and choose
options consistent with who we desire to be.
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| Word Guild Award 2009 |
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| Word Guild Award 2011 |
1 comment:
It is sobering when one considers the changes that have taken place - even in the last five years! Change is accelerating like never before, making some of those old 'futuristic' novels seem quite plausible indeed.
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