Here I blog about my personal experiences [posting rarely]
At my tumblelog Intoxicated by possibility I blog about my opinions/likes/dislikes [posting heavily]
Is the Internet gloryfing collectivism?
Published by Abhilash Ravishankar on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 3:04 PMVarun invited me to blog at Similitude - a new team blog where "people blog for the pure selfish joy of writing". Reminded me of those golden times when I read Atlas Shrugged. Here's a mirror of the first post that I made at the blog.
As I pen this first post for Similitude, my media player has Floyd playing some of their best music. One of their songs, coupled with one of Salvador Dali's drawings (above) titled 'Ants and wheat ear' inspired this post's title.
As I just sipped some coffee a few minutes back, it struck me:
- I hadn't updated my whereabouts on Twitter
- I had to take a look at the snaps that my brother uploaded on Flickr in the morning
- I hadn't posted on my Tumblr blog today
- My del.icio.us account needed pruning by adding bundles
- I had to put a clip of my Google Reader's shared items somewhere
And beat this. All of us are doing so. We are just like those ants over the wheat ear. All we want is a piece of that wheat. Blindly we go about pulling that wheat ear in whichever direction we want. (You do know that when ants are moving something big, not all ants are pulling/pushing it in the same direction, don't you?). At the end of the day, the wheat ear does move. Not where we wanted it to, but how the collective spirit of mankind wanted it to.
(Now I understand why TIME said the Person of the Year 2006 was 'You')
The question is:
Is technology/internet illustrating that collectivism is far more glorious than the spirit of individualism?
Posted by Abhilash Ravishankar
Labels: collectivism, individualism, Internet, salvador dali, technology
1 Comment:
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- Uzma said...
6:12 AMI think the tussle between individualism and collectivism is cyclical..where one era saw collectivism in the form of people fighting for various causes..freedom,feminism ..the past few decades had been more about individual achievements.When the self loses all identity in the community you shall find individualism thriving again. And you need both for society to progress..so rating one over the other wouldn't really work.
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This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of the people, institutions or organizations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.