Here's a test. What do you think/feel when you read this report: "There are now 8% more millionaires in the US than last year; 243,000 of them right here in Illinois alone."
Admit it. All kinds of images and judgments click into place. Tainted with all sorts of admiration and resentment, respect and envy. What's more, if they were to publish these new millionaires' faces, your thoughts/feelings would register even faster and more strongly.
That, my friend, is called profiling.
You see, profiling is not simply what cops do tracking different drivers, or what neighbors do watching new occupants. or bosses do meeting new applicants. Everyone is and has been profiling everyone else ever since the beginning of time. Only now -- astonishingly armed with 24/7 images from both the news media (TV & Papers) and the social media (Blogs & Facebook) -- we can profile faster and more impetuously than ever.
Historically, we've profiled people largely by what our senses could process. Their face...their body...their smile ...their voice...their strut ...their fragrance...their touch. But now -- well, now technology has scooped everything and everyone up into this giant maelstrom of bytes and pixels whereby we can instantly access and profile millions of people from wherever we are sitting with a hand on a keypad.
We have them all right there in the palm of our profiling hands. Not only what they look like, but where they come from...what they have done and said years ago....what they buy and who they like. Be they candidates or elected officials or university faculty or players or past lovers or present competitors. Damn, this kind of digital power is amazing. Is fun. Is downright God-like!
A respectful pause here.
That little burst is not to Amishly argue technology is bad.Technology has never been either bad or good. It's the users who determine that. But therein lies the big plot to this little burst. Lets be honest. It's not just giggling teens misusing this vast storehouse of information for the vile pleasure of snarky little gotchas. It's the googling celebrity magazines. Political operatives. Campaign managers. Corporate rivals. Legal rivals. Lobby groups. Just about anyone with too many resentments and too many hours on their hands.
What we have here is not a failure to communicate. Rather, it is an obsession to communicate. A national obsession which has transfigured the neighborhood gossip behind pulled curtains into a cosmic role model that virtually anyone of us can replicate. Which prompts the qustion: What the hell is wrong with us...?
Too big a question. Too small a space.
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ALL RIGHT...I ADMIT IT
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