This post got me thinking about the idea that our society is immensely spoon-fed through and though. When I say “ours” I’m largely referring to the “first world” countries considering we’re the only ones who can afford to be. Between Canada (we come first, bitches), Japan (they come second), America (take that, Yanks), and large parts of Europe and Asia, we’re all doing pretty darned well for ourselves, between the excessive buying of iPods (everyone and their goat in a sweatshop), devouring of expensive foodstuffs (even nachos are overpriced luxury items now), and investment in odd sexual devices (wildarmsheero, I’m looking at you).

But are we becoming just a little too damned complacent in our first world comforts?

The reason my brain made the jump from simple perusal of the daily blogosphere to the amber alert on society is the idea that everything “needs” to have online distribution at this point. On the one hand we’ve got people with a ridiculous amount of mobile devices that can do everything short of rinse your anus (though I’m sure we’re working on that) which might lead you to believe that we’re all out and about more often because we buy things to make sure we have everything with us on the road.

I’d buy that, except for the ridiculous amount of people who have cell phones and never leave their houses. Ever.

The fact is that we’ve become a society of bloody basement-dwellers and socialite drunks. If we’re not out on a dance floor trying to get our rocks off with some pretty thing across the room, we’re buried in some god-forsaken dungeon of a computer room with our eyes glued to the monitor. Okay that’s an exaggeration and simplification, but it’s true for some people in a disgustingly accurate way.

What I’m really getting at is the whole “buy it online” mentality. I subscribe to it by and large as well, but I still like to trot down to my local businesses and get my hands on the produce once a week. I think once you’ve had this experience you return to it in a fond sort of way, unless you live an extremely stressful life and find the experience rote and taxing. But then you’d have bigger issues that being a dungeon-crawler, wouldn’t you?

I had written rather briefly asking the question as to why people enjoy buying things at anime conventions. Double gave me the reply I was looking for, and so I’ve sort of adjusted to the idea as a good thing. Digital distribution doesn’t bother me on the whole, but the social ramifications make a small buzzer in the back of my head go off that tells me the whole market-shopping idea is that much better for us.

You see a number of years ago I came away from digital distribution with the idea that most people actually preferred to go to a store for the very fact that you could see the merchandise. That was shortly after the dot-com boom had decided to go boom-boom in its pants and everyone was losing faith in the web as a business model. But the web revived, albeit in a slightly less ostentatious fashion, and business resumed as normal. The fact is that now after a few years of a dry spell towards online buying, it’s reaching a pretty thin, glass ceiling, the sort of which won’t be able to contain it much longer.

Now the term “spoon-fed” is perhaps unfair, but consider that our parents had to go the extra mile (or kilometre) in a car/bus/on foot to go to the store and shop in a manual sort of fashion. We’ve taken that and made it an almost automatic routine, adding in “one-click” buying and other sort of brevity-inserting options that make us all the more able to stuff our day full of a lot of nothing.

Is it any wonder we’re bored? But perhaps that’s my age showing (24 not being that old mind you). Maybe I’m just out on a limb here about the whole thing. Yet despite part of me just wanting to say to myself “put up and shut up, there isn’t much you can do to influence all this”, I feel compelled to say something. When things get too bloody easy on us, we start to manifest some bad habits. One of those has been downloading in excess just about anything we can get away from paying for. That’s part of this whole “spoon-feeding” issue. We’re essentially all holding spoons out to each other with the notion of “it’s legal if you don’t get caught” and “DVDs are overpriced”, and we then wonder why the alarmists are starting to go hoarse from protracted wailing.

But that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.