Meaning in our Life

Today I was looking at the Boggled Blogger (sorry I don't even know who that is, is your name on there? sorry for my lack of knowledge!) I was reading the blog Among the Hidden and it reminded me of a certain episode of Stargate Atlantis (yes I love that show! This may change the meaning of me in your eyes but oh well!) where the Atlantis team goes to a world where there is an extreme difference between the "royals" and the "commoners". The team couldn't believe that people would still live in such poverty when they really shouldn't have to. And how they viewed their situation,their environment and the people that they had to be serve.

I started to think about how this group (commoners) didn't have access to outside information so their meaning would be similar to a lot of the people around them (didn't have access to other meanings). Just interaction with a new group from Atlantis changed many of the meanings in their lives; this makes me question our meanings for items in our society. The Internet alone has created access to so much more information and opinions than any generation before us. This information gives or can give us such a different meaning to many of the things we see around us on the daily basis.

Think about what our grandparents think of when we say certain things, probably completely different than what we think of. This isn't a bad thing or probably a good thing, just different. I wonder if we all have such differing views because of this? Would classrooms back ten, twenty years ago be so diverse? Would they have had the ability or opportunity to be as diverse as we are? Is this the reasoning for so much more controversy in our generation?

Can we judge a group that has had no outside exposure to other meanings? Should we even try? In anthropology, the people who go out and study the culture (group) try to have a lot of knowledge on that group. This may make them more able or more prepared to understand the meaning of certain items in that group/culture but can we really understand? During Stargate Atlantis there were moments where I felt the Atlantis team was almost being condescending to the commoners for accepting this way of life, but can they really expect any different?

I know that this blog was a bit all over the place but I just really wonder about the Internet affecting a lot of our meanings. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it affecting at all?