Hello World

Hello world, and welcome to my blog. The purpose of this blog, like many others, is to make its readers think, give them different perspectives on things, to entertain them, in that order. The subject that my posts will center around is conceptions of spirituality and its role in peoples lives, focusing on people in my age group (late teens to early 20s). I chose this age group, not only because I am a part of it, but because I think that we currently inhabit a unique position, both in our lives and in the scope of human history as a whole. We are right at the age where we are beginning to think about and try to make our own personal conclusions on spiritual and psychological issues. These decisions that we collectively make now will probably have major sway in the direction that the entire world goes in the coming decades as we are currently next in line to become the “adults” of the world. Besides that, I also think that people within that age range have had a unique experience with regard to spiritual and psychological issues.

We were born at the end of the 20th century and spent our childhood in a world that was still on the upward climb of industrialization. Mechanization and secularization were the main themes of the world in our childhood. However, around the turn of the century, (the beginning of my pre-teen and teenage years) computers took over and these were quickly replaced with digitalization and globalization. Before high school, we had already experienced the peak of the industrial age and the birth of the digital one. This digitalization created new networks of instant communication, at first simply for practical reasons, but these new technologies soon discovered their most beneficial (and profitable) uses: human to human contact. Due to the digitalization of information, networks of human connections have grown to a scale that has never before been seen in all of human history. Now, like minded individuals can communicate their ideas no matter where they are. I want to explore these connections and see what effect they are having upon the collective consciousness of humanity and the basic assumptions that we make about the universe and our place in it. Being born in 1988, I experienced first hand the growth of these technologies and was among the first to use them socially. Instant messaging became text messaging, morphed into myspace, upgraded to facebook and has now reincarnated itself as twitter. Me and my peers are first generation users of all of these social networks, and at times have influenced how they were refined and developed. I look at my generation right now as either the youngest adults or the oldest children.

The issues that I will cover on this blog will come from any relevant source such as news, class, personal experience or that of a friend or even simply from my own head. Of course, much of what I saw on the blog will be subjective, but I will try to back up any claims I make with evidence. I will also make sure to draw the line quite obviously between what I consider fact and what I know to be simply my opinion (no matter how strongly I may believe it). Some posts will include historical data, when necessary, to back them up, but I will mostly be looking forward and predicting rather than retracing what has already happened. A lot of the blog will be dedicated to the music industry and how it is unfolding in this increasingly digital world. This is because, I am studying the music industry in school and a lot of the issues that it is going through can be applied to other industries and the world as a whole. The digital revolution hit the music industry abruptly and unexpectedly, causing it to make radical changes, the better of these may be indicators of the path for other art forms. However, although I will speak a lot about music, I want my blog to be accessible to people with no particular interest in in music specifically, simply with an interest in humanity and how we grow and adapt to rapid, radical, self-imposed change.