The Demise of the Social Outlet

Social outlets serve a much deeper function in modern society than we may realize at the time...but we are about to find out how deep.

Kindles, Nooks etc.   The new eye candy that has the tired 'must have' moniker tagged on it to attract our muddled attention and lead us to fall in line with the other i-robots.   The book store is where I met my wife.   Her mother met her second husband there, and the same woman caught her first husband having an affair at a Barnes & Noble cafe.  

We've already been electronically weaned off from record stores; remember those?   Two story Virgin Mega stores with multiple sampling headphones.   DVD libraries and obscure Rock & roll merchandising.   Or how about the local, private owned record stores?   Gone.   All of them.   Dissolved into a MB world of oblivion.   Oh the music is still out there; in there...somewhere where you can download it to your iPod along with some 5,000 other singles stored in semi-anonymity.  

Is there an impact for losing two major social outlets in our society?   In the age of superior information technology, are we actually becoming less able to actually communicate or, dare I say, are we becoming increasingly reclusive?   I do not claim to know the shift in our society from losing these outlets for human interaction in a ‘face to face’ environment but I do trust in this:   There will be an impact.   Not drastic and will nary be noticeable.   But it will be there.

To quote a favorite visionary of mine: "We are content in the 'given' in sensation's quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark."