Paradigm Shift

When I was in college I read a book about the nature of scientific revolution. It was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution. About the only thing I remember of it was the broad concept of paradigm shift. In order to phrase it correctly, or maybe in order to explain it in manner that exceeds my limited capability I cribbed this from the Wiki world…

“A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it.”

A shift in the worldview… Okay my wife is editing her Facebook page. I am editing my blog. I am scanning other blogs and reading headlines from various newspapers around the world. My kids are finishing watching a TV show on an internet site. This is the new world. The time of access to information from sources like print and television, with pretty well defined internal structures is gone. 

 The three big networks with their news divisions have been rendered irrelevant. The morning and evening newspaper battle has been exploded by Twitter, and twenty other apps. The telephone is an antiquity.  Bottom line here is my children have no idea of the organized ritualized information world I grew up in.

The paradigm has shifted.