Why Would Everybody Want to Know Everything About Everyone Else?

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

I'm of the generation that grew up in a different time..less techie, less intimate; personal but only with close friends. We had hard-wired landlines. We obtained our information from daily newspapers, weekly magazines and, if one could afford them, a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. Libraries were wonderful but every bit of information in there was, like the Encyclopedia, dated.

The list of media changes over the past 50 years is extensive and easily found by a simple Google search. The only things modern in my life were fashion and computers.

Because of the computer usage in my life, I grasped new tech things with gusto but my goal was mainly accessing medical research. I loved knowing the latest medical research before it was published in medical journals! (Yep, I was often a smart-aleck nurse who one-upped the interns.)

My cousin has had some hesitations with social networking. Today she asked why everybody wants to know everything about everyone else?

I think I know what she means. I was there once.

It has taken a little longer time for me to grow into Facebook, Twitter, and blogging. It wasn't because of Luddite beliefs that kept me away from Facebook and Twitter (since I already had a good medically-oriented website and even a mailing list devoted to Neurontin, a medication that had granted me some relief from pain), but was more secondary to not wanting to open myself up to such intimate incursions into my rather isolated life. Why would anyone want to know so much about me? And even if someone did, they probably wouldn't want 140-word messages from me.

I'm a relatively new Facebook user but after signing up, the sky didn't fall and it took seconds to reconnect with lots of people I'd met over the years that I'd been hadn't been able to find on my own.

Twitter was more difficult for me. After signing up for it, I found it insufferably trivial. It wan't until I connected with lists and people I found interesting did I start the learning curve.

I gave up the daily newspaper about 15 years ago. That's unusual for people of my age. This was not done as an indictment against newspapers but, rather, was because I am disabled and managing the disposal of my trash became controlled by how much I could carry to the dumpster. Daily newspapers soon became just too much weight to carry. So that habit was broken. Like any withdrawal, it was difficult.

News magazines once were beautiful examples of those daily news stories explored in depth. Their weight at disposal again caused problems for me. I weaned myself down to one weekly magazine (New York Magazine) but then finances made me drop them, too.

For years, the only news I got came via TV and I had been happy with that. Occasionally, in between reading medical research from PubMed, I'd peek at the New York Times.

Today I get my daily news from Google Reader. It allows me to keep up with reporters I would never have read as well as explore other blogs.

Between Google Reader and the more immediate Twitter, I'm undoubtedly reading more diverse information in far more depth than I did 40 years ago.

To the question "why does everybody want to know everything about everyone else?"

The answer is: We Want to Know EVERYTHING! Now!

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