The Resounding Shift

Humanity, in general, has had a pretty good ride. Our history books are saturated with great leaders, blossoming kingdoms, heroic underdogs, and sweeping inventions. We look back – thousands of years – at our ancestors, and we are still mystified and humbled by their accomplishments. We wonder what life was actually like in Roman times, and we wish we could live in ancient Mesopotamia for just one day.

And yet we rarely step back to see that our lifetime – the present – will likely be marked as the most crucial, exciting, and enviable era in human history. Despite our wars, murderers, and corrupted economies, the greatness of our early 21st century Earth may never be matched.

Not because of the tall buildings, or Internet, or globalization, or new vaccines, though those are all wonderful physical products of the truest reason. Rather, because the human mindset – maybe even condition – was forever altered in the most incredible manner. Today, having been raised after this dynamic shift, if I can think of something, I assume that such a something will one day come to fruition.

I imagine a world filled with flying cars, and undoubtedly expect that our engineers will one day make such a world possible. Movie producers depict humans inhabiting worlds millions of miles away, and movie-goers expect that one day – albeit a very faraway day – humans will inhabit such worlds. And if they don’t expect these somethings, they most certainly do not deny that they could possibly occur.

This tremendous circumstance of expectancy and belief was nonexistent just fifty years ago. Speak to my grandmother, whose friends in 1955 never believed for an instant that a human being would one day roam the dusty surface of the moon. Speak to your parents or aunts and uncles, who doubt the mobile internet will ever become a serviceable function. (Okay, so that latter example was my media talking, but you get the idea.)

This is not to say that awesome happenings were not considered and glorified back in the day – the creation of several early science fiction films portraying time travel and the like make this clear. However, in the eyes of humans en masse, those happenings and somethings were never expected or assumed, wholeheartedly, to occur.

So, all things considered, there always existed some people who truly expected anything imaginable to become possible, just as today there exists some people who remain unassuming. For the first and only time in history, however, humans – as a people – have undergone a categorical shift in mentality: we now expect anything that we can imagine to one day come to form. And what more important a change can occur?

Understanding this resounding and historic shift is essential to understanding the problems that currently threaten media as an institution, even if the reach of that change extends far beyond the media industry. Having acknowledged this change, I intend to narrow my focus in future posts to media and its remedies.