The Most Annoying Cliche of the Last Twenty Years

 

 

 

Cliches are by their very nature annoying (unless I say them because of course I'm being cool and therefore ironic) but the worst offender because of its sheer pretentiousness is the following:

"Never before has our world been so closely connected by technology, yet never before have people been so disconnected, alienated, and lonely."

I thought this statement was profound when I first read it in the early 1990s (Harper's magazine perhaps), but since then I've been inundated by this statement or some variation, which has become hackneyed and sanctimonious. 

Comments

[Doug T.]

Well, of course, this is just a variation on Marx's theory of alienation, which dates back to 1844, and probably has earlier antecedents.

Charlotte Bronte's 1849 Shirley, which is set during the Luddite riots, also addresses this theme.

Another popular variation of this cliche is that technology is making us all stupid in some way or another (illiterate, or mass attention-deficit-disorder, etc.) I personally heard this complaint as early as the 1970s, when personal calculators were supposedly destroying the nation's mathematical skills.