Those who talk of “the end of civilisation” when referring to the banality of contemporary culture are hopefully being alarmist. Humanity has always stooped low and still civilisation maintains. That said, I do wonder if the end of greatness is nigh. In the arts the end of greatness comes when there is so much art to be had that any piece is as valid as any other. It is no big deal as there is another piece next to it, and another. In this setting there are as many performers on the stage as there are in the audience. It is no longer easy to single out a particular artist who stands apart as there are so many. This is the current scenario and it grows exponentially by the day.

Historically, intellectual life was conducted in an elite environment away from the mundane. To be educated at all used to be rare. Until recently a higher education was for the privileged minority. Progressives were usually separate in some way, either solitary or as part of an elite. Those who came up with the high value ingredients necessary for development whether political, social, scientific or artistic nearly always emerged from some alternative environment away from the mainstream. Without such pioneers there would have been no progress and thus no civilisation. This is not to say that the farmer in the field, the worker in the factory, the miner down the pit weren't essential but the crucial difference is that they were followers. The thoughts, ideas and creative essence that is the fundament of progress was always the business of the radical.

Forever people have been caught up in the struggle with nature. The endeavour was to elevate away from primal dependency, to create a workable morality, to educate, to build social and political systems that served the best interests. Such efforts have always been a battle and continue to be. Those who provide the elemental spark for these developments are a small number in the population, the proverbial one in a million. This is why the Newtons and the Einsteins are valued so highly; it is why the messages of The Bhudda and Jesus Christ have endured; it is why Beethoven and Mozart remain meaningful.

I wonder if there is currently a danger of losing these all important aspects of greatness that have nurtured civilisation. What does it say about discernment when a service like Twitter, a facility which thrives on the mundane, can become such a phenomenon so quickly? I do understand that the so called social networks are what you make them and can of course be used for powerful messages as well as trivial. But how can anyone with anything important to say be heard above the sheer volume of noise coming from the majority? It seems that the relevant thing about Twitter's content is its ephemeral nature. Its attractiveness is its lack of analysis, of reflection or depth. In themselves these media are relatively harmless. But if they exist in a context where the traditional forms of greatness are diminished then this is another matter. The civilising factors of progress become threatened. The historical difficulties associated with raising humanity from its base biology are overlooked. That gargantuan task, only ever partially successful at best, is undermined by modern culture's crass celebration of ordinariness.

The much talked about openness and desire to share that emanates from the online social networks runs counter to the norms where people tend to preserve their privacy. Instead they are offering up the detail of their lives for wider dissemination. Google cameras have been driven across Britain recently photographing every street and every building. If a government had tried to do that there would have been an uproar. And rightly so. It took a long time for limitations on power to be applied in the forms of the various statutes associated with free societies. Western governments are far more hamstrung by these principles than is appreciated. Anything furtive that might have potentially sinister dimensions is exposed as far as possible by a prying media. Governments are consequently mindful of what will fly and what won't. The new tech companies like Google, YouTube and Facebook are in their infancy and thus considered unthreatening by the public. This is why Google can photograph your house and make it available for all to see. Other than a few eccentric paranoids no one complains particularly. Google after all does not do evil. Not yet.

Of course any serious privacy issues would manifest later down the line after seeds had been sown blindly for some Orwellian nightmare. The contradiction here is the difference between the virtual and the actual, between the apparent openness of the online communities and the established traditions of how people have tended to behave which is to cleave to their privacy. They are extremely concerned with exclusivity in every area of social and public life. They respect property rights, laws of contract and relationship fidelity which are all rooted in exclusive claims. There is a whole battery of established convention about what these things mean and the value that is invested in them. Domestic life, work life and social life are organised and maintained around highly exclusive codes. Sharing is noble and encouraged when possible but only in a limited way.

The virtual world is different. It is easier to find some detailed information about a person you don't know thousands of miles away than it is to find your reading glasses. This is reality distortion. The preparedness to share that is exhibited by the new communities flies in the face of custom. For all their benefits, and the benefits are considerable, there is something suspect about this new virtuality which requires examination. Civilisation is a precarious thing. It shouldn’t be left to the paranoid cranks to point that out.