A Small World After All

My understanding of the Enlightenment is that people, collectively, began to try to define existence by the boundaries of comprehension and analysis--to suck the world into their brains. In addition to bigger brains they got a small world, increasingly stripped of mystery and the primally true awareness of one's own inconsequence and absurdity. It's a very masculine, "left-brain" approach. 

Social Media Culture seems to have worsened it. The "big brain" project has been delegated to experts and specialists, as opposed to generalists, so intelligence and competence are increasingly unintegrated and embedded in technologies which do the heavy lifting of life for us, further separating and insulating people from meaningful experiences. It culminates in solipsism and the conundrum and paradox of limitless, never-ceasing connectedness being associated with loneliness and isolation.

Maybe the connectedness is too diffuse to be traditionally hierarchical and it makes real intimacy difficult. Maybe people don't have the emotional capacity to maintain their privacy against the onslaught of information and their friends and acquaintances get reduced to data points. That trend, my friends, is mysterious to me because the resulting dissatisfaction and misery should be self-limiting.