As connecting with others becomes easier, the world seems to become smaller. Our individual worlds, on the other hand, are growing.
With the idea of a smaller world, we have become accustomed to deal with news relating to this whole world. In principle nothing has changed, we seek to have the information relevant for the world we consider to be our world. In terms of content, everything changed.
The amount of information available to us has been constantly growing. The scope of the information we believe to have to know about has changed in the same way.
Instead of listening to the news from our village, city or region we expect to know what is happening across continents.
Institutions like the European Commission act on multiple levels and contribute to the development all across Europe. The number of projects to which it contributes is immense.
These two changes of scopes, i.e. the information interesting to us and the information available lead to an exponential growth of the information we need to structure and filter.
It is overwhelming. Cutting through the noise is almost impossible. It requires our attention for specific information or subjects.
It requires new abilities to structure the information available, select the information interesting to us and process it.
We might opt for an overview of all the information or in-depth specific information. What remains unchanged, is the expectation to be informed.
It’s a race impossible to win. And yet, to most of us, it is an important one as it is linked to two basic human needs, the one to have structure and the one to be able to have an impact.
The less our expectation to feel informed is met, the larger the felt distance to those producing the information. Resulting in a sense of distance between those leading the countries and those living in that country.
In such a situation our individual opportunity to have an impact doesn’t meet the results we are hoping for. The impact from governments and leading organizations, on the other hand, takes time to become accessible and tangible.
Both widen the gap and the felt distance.
Reestablishing connections which allow for a feeling of closeness require to learn to deal with our expectation to be informed and our ability to inform ourselves.
