It was process begun in Britain in the mid 18th century that later spread to other countries. Its term was popularised in 1852 by economic historian Arnold Toynbee as the Industrial Revolution, and it gave people the impression that science and technology can, and will, not only solve all problems, but provide a better quality of exponentially improving life for all. Rather, it has instead delivered unfettered gentrification, and not simply a worldwide technological and economic divide, but a widening chasm.
Most of us are aware that 1% of the world’s population holds all the money there is; in itself a staggering eighty million individuals. Illustratively, it’s a little less than the entire population of Turkey. In terms of our current global population of 7.79 billion, it’s frighteningly miniscule. As is our skill in critical thinking. Social media has provided a medium in which the ignorant now have a voice. This gives the tendency for tropes and buzzwords to radiate, carrying exclusive paradigms that effectively close down discussion. We use a content marketing agency rather than personally connecting all the time; and it’s easy to get the ball rolling and go viral with half-baked ideas of promises that science and technology have not given.
Communication, by and large, has become heavily reliant on tropes delivered with neither embarrassment nor the need to justify or explain. Just over a century ago, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity caused immense changes in perspective because of its awareness and attentiveness to the correlation of time and reality, yet within a decade of that, the development of quantum physics did not have anything like the same effect on modern thinking. It appears that by then, human curiosity had somehow started to wane in the same way we no longer notice or comment on marketing emergency electrical fixes.
