On January 31st, 2018, our HIST 390 class discussed the topic of “selves” and how the concept of “selves” has changed over the years.  To summarize, everyone has multiple selves within them, whether they truly realize it or not.   When you are partaking in a job that you do not particularly enjoy, there are technically two selves that you can consciously acknowledge: there is the self that hates the job and then there is the self that acknowledges that you agreed to the job in the first place.  Neither are more legitimate than the other, but they are conflicting parts of yourself that you can acknowledge both exist.  It is the same with reading silently to oneself, as there is a self that is reading silently and there is a self that is trying to listen and absorb what is being read.  You’d think that you would do either one action or the other, but both are existing simultaneously regardless of one might think.  People having multiple selves is nothing new, but what was discussed in class was whether different generations and eras had different selves than those present in the current generations’.  As proof of this discrepancy, the professor showed us a clip of a movie from the past where an entire squadron of fire fighters went to go save a woman and her children from a burning building, the major takeaway being how it was directed compared to how modern films were directed.  Compared to a movie like, say, “Saving Private Ryan”, where the perspective of the viewer continually jumps around to show the viewer many different perspectives of the scene, the clip shown to us first showed the scene of the fire fighters saving the woman and her children from their perspective, showing the woman panicking as she sees the smoke all around her and running around in terror until a firefighter breaks into the room and leads her and her children to safety.  The movie then shows the same scene, but through the point of view of the fire fighters in front of the house.  At the time this particular movie and scene was made, it was believed that it was impossible to see all aspects of a story at the same time, and so they showed all of the different perspectives one at a time.  On the other hand, modern movies such as “Saving Private Ryan” showed various points of view, some being quite impossible if one actually took the time to think about it.  The movie even took a moment to show you the scene from the perspective of the enemy forces!  Surely, this is proof to the belief that people’s understanding of self has changed over the years.

In an attempt to explain this difference in attitude to the concept of “self”, I would hypothesize that the reason why modern movies such as “Saving Private Ryan” show so many perspectives at the same time throughout a scene is because the birth of the digital age has made our generation more used to information overload, and because of that, movie studios choose to take advantage of this and essentially give the viewer an information overload of their own for any or all particular scenes in their movies, and because we are used to absorbing so much information at a time, it doesn’t bother us as much as it probably should.  If anything, we are at our most comfortable when we are given information overload, especially when we know that we aren’t going to be tested or quizzed on said information.  With portable phones and with the internet at our very fingertips, this generation is constantly bombarded, by their own volition, with a heavy influx of information.  We just can’t get enough.  In fact, if you look at movie reviews nowadays, a common complaint is that the movie did not explain enough about the plot, scene, or character motivation.  When we are truly invested, we crave the information, whether it is even really important in the big scheme of things or not.  Perhaps in the simpler and more primitive times of the old movie clip of the fire fighters saving the woman and her children from the burning building, all of the information that we absorb now would be far too overwhelming for them to handle, at least all at once.  Whether the current environment of information overload is a blessing or a curse, however, is another topic altogether, and it might not even have a true correct answer in the first place.