Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Do We Need To Know Everything? … NOW!

I have always admired my fellow man’s thirst for knowledge. We have all benefited from the wonderful things invented or discovered by thirsty or just plain curious people.
The above having been said, the electronic world we live in today is really going to extremes regarding the dissemination of information. When Ted Turner started this 24/7 news barrage many of us thought things like, “Why are they putting news on TV over and over all day and night? They are telling me things that they just told me a half hour ago.”
Now we are demanding that they tell us news over and over and quicker and quicker. We don’t want to wait for anything. We install apps on our phones to notify us immediately when something is happening that we think we can’t do without.
I saw where there is an app that will notify you when a High Speed Pursuit is live on TV.
Can you imagine if Doctor Jonas Salk had been one of these High Speed Pursuit Junkies. Every time he started to make headway on his Polio Vaccine his phone would play the silly little tune he had carefully selected. He would have stopped his research and ran to his TV to watch the latest chase in progress. When he got hack to his work bench, he would have been heard to say, “Now where was I?’
If this obsession had been his obsession, we would still have Iron Lungs all over the place. (For those of you who don’t know what an Iron Lung is, Google It!)
I read where, during all those storms in recent weeks the Weather Channel downloaded as many as 47,000 of their Weather Apps a day. Three days after that tornado hit Joplin, Missouri sales of all weather apps were up by an average of 1,866%.
Did the existence of all those apps save a single life? I know one thing for certain, Jay Leno could probably have found a man on the street who said, “I don’t care about lives that were saved. I want to know about lives lost and I want to know about them fast!”
The Smartfella? believes there are things that we would be better off not knowing…
Superman … If the first Superman Comic Book had just been published, we would certainly see commentaries, analyses, documentaries, news conferences and national poling results  about how illogical the very idea of a superman is.
Both the children of America and I would have found this very unnerving.
Here is the kind of thing we would have been exposed to…
  • Clothes – How is it possible that after Superman leaves his phone booth after having changed his clothes and flown away to fight injustice and no one ever finds his clothes in there? (For those of you who don’t know what a Phone Booth is, Google It!)
  • His Super Face – How is it possible that simply taking off his glasses makes him completely unrecognizable to people who see him and work with him every day?
  • His Super Voice – The same holds true for his voice. How come no one ever said, “You sound exactly like Clark Kent?”
If yesterday were today, Superman never would have gotten off the ground.
Would I kid u?