The Internet

Aaaaand we're back. Gah.

It's interesting to notice that every electronic communication medium we have developed in the past century and a half is spoken of as if it is a separate, physical location.

I saw it happen "on TV".
I talked with her "on the phone".
We chatted "online" or "on the Internet".

So no wonder we develop psychological issues regarding these media.
We've made them a completely separate universe instead of simply treating them as enhanced forms of normal communication.

A conversation via phone is still a conversation.
The whole point of the telephone's invention was to allow people to have a conversation without being limited by shouting distance.

Receiving information via TV is still receiving information.
We who still read newspapers don't treat the newspaper as some kind of microcosm in which words are different or have different meanings than they would if someone gave us the information by speaking aloud in our physical presence.

Perhaps we have this mentality because our access to these communication media is dependent upon technological progress.

Our ancestors could have never imagined television (or radio, for that matter).
Information was in a constant state of out-of-date, depending on how long it took distributors of it to receive it, process it, condense it into a format which could be broadcast, and then broadcast it.
Put in specific terms, if an enemy army was attacking, someone had to see it and run to the king, the king would send someone to run to the town criers, and the town criers would tell everyone in the town, at least everyone within shouting distance.
This process could take weeks, depending on how big the kingdom was.

Print made it a little easier, but you still had to have someone physically take the printed information to the masses.

Compare that to today's by-the-millisecond, twenty-four-hour information stream, hitting us at home and on the road and at work.

No wonder scientists figure we've created more information in the past ten years than humanity did in the past thousand.
Which I think is partially due to not much of the ancients' information surviving to the present day.
Hard to look at hieroglyphics and figure out what ancient Egyptians talked about while drunk.
Pretty sure it wasn't Osiris being killed and cut into pieces.

It's also no wonder that we're cracking up psychologically.
The world has always been in a constant state of change (biologically, geologically, socially, culturally, technologically, etc.), but up until these past twenty years or so we weren't so keenly aware of it.

Thus old people bemoan the loss of stability, and new adults seek desperately for it, unable to gain their parents' and grandparents' illusion which held out for so many millennia.