“Life moves pretty fast” says Ferris Bueller, and it is moving faster and faster with each day. In the modern world the children and young adults of this era increasingly feel the wrenching collapse of space time bearing down upon us.    As we age, our perceptions of reality narrow into a turbulent acceleration defined less and less by why and more and more by how.

As the fresh empty canvas of the information hungry infant brain oxidizes in the marrow of time and experience our inner quest for ‘why’ is replaced by doctrines of ‘how’ and the information we compile over time that once shone with exciting possibility, is kneaded unlovingly back down into our increasingly stimulated and insufficient minds. 

This fearsome deviation is marked by a bandwidth overload. 

As more information floods our inherently curious but incapable minds our neurology attempts to weave an explanatory tapestry of understanding but at the advent of bandwidth capacity we are simply left in states of freewheeling neuroticism or quiet fragmentation. 

The power of the mind to choose and select information of use can only remain tenable at a slow drip but the acceleration of technology has suddenly squeezed the bag at the other end of the needle in our arm making us too woozy to press the button for help on our bedside table.

Age used to be the main factor in how much one could know. Like the innumerable rings on an old redwood, wrinkles across the brow of a wise elder once represented a lifetime spent amassing information. Only with the passage of time could we steep ourselves long enough in information to be able to express and reflect on what we’d learned with true preponderance.

But now as our technology produces media capable of rapid system overload we have artificially circumnavigated the aged face and been inflicted a far more grievous psychic trauma. 

No longer capable of storing vital information in our own brains we have outsourced our most prized intellectual possessions to an artificial entity we may one day meet a fate of becomingly only host to as our reliance on these tools develop. 

Today we have started to make the mistake that the access to information is greater than its acquisition. 

To acquire information requires you to be ready to receive it and in turn wield it with purpose and intent. If you ingest information without the hardware to employ it not only will there be inherent frustration as a result of impotence but attempting to actualize information without the proper knowledge of its applicability will cause harm and confusion for you and everyone around you.

As a metaphor, imagine having the blueprint to build a house without knowing how to drive a nail with a hammer (frustration). Or on the other hand imagine a child watching their parents be brutally executed by a psychopath (confusion).

Learning of how things are without a developed understanding of why things are will result in trauma and psychic disturbance. 

Of course these metaphorical examples I have given have occurred to people in one way or the other the other and houses still get built and children still live happy lives but turning that type of metaphor over onto the vast majority of human beings results in a mass state of irreparable harm as the majority of people alive today exponentially consume information beyond our understanding at a rapidly unhealthy rate. 

With the increase of psychic trauma caused by overexposure to information both irreconcilable to our understanding and complicated in our ability to integrate it we have started down a dark path. 

This is the path to ‘un-enlightenment’. The enlightenment era was a time where information illuminated our understanding so we could grow and exceed but it has become such a commodity in our world that it now either numbs us from experiencing our core values and realities or it unrealistically inflates our understandings and drives us mad. 

The only thing that can save us is delineating the value of knowledge and information if there is ever a hope of turning around and walking back into the light.

Note: Rowan Rockwell wrote this for an assignment about the media framing communitcation theory in the Intro to Mass Communication course.