Princess Adelaide has the whooping-cough
May 1, 2017 10:11 PM Subscribe
Are We Having Too Much Fun? - And the metaphorical nature of television, Postman argued, has meant that TV and its very particular logic—its assumptions, its aesthetics, its image-oriented and episodic understanding of the world—have found their way into other areas of American cultural life.
Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan (the former actor, he pointed out, had won a second term in a field that included another celebrity, the former astronaut John Glenn); he wrote long after Richard Nixon had made that tentative, awkward appearance on Laugh-In (“sock it to meeeee”), and slightly before a relatively obscure governor of Arkansas would prove his ability to lead the most powerful nation in the world by playing the sax on The Arsenio Hall Show. He wrote during the time when it was the newly standard practice for national politicians like George McGovern and Jesse Jackson to both prove and amplify their popularity by hosting Saturday Night Live.
The Image in the Age of Pseudo-Reality
is Snapchat the sign of a post-literary future?
CNN treats politics like sports — and it’s making us all dumber
Who is The Man To Blame For Our Culture Of Fame?
The Real World: Trump Edition - "The question remains, though, how such a machine came to dominate our political landscape and control our basic political consciousness to such a point that Donald J. Trump could feasibly, actually—and successfully—run for president. Again, with so much of this ultra-mediated status quo feeling new, with so much talk of “fake news,” echo chambers, “alternative facts,” etc. tied directly to Trump’s presidency, it’s easy to lose sight of how deep and how American the roots of this historical moment are. A long history of interlocking forces made Trump’s victory possible—and made enough people desire such a victory, and distanced plenty of others from the reality of what that victory would entail, while keeping us all absolutely riveted to the process of the collective cultural manufacture of an ersatz president. That history starts with the telegraph."
The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Meet the man who predicted Fox News, the Internet, Stephen Colbert and reality TV
Donald Trump, Master of the Pseudo-Event
Chaos of Facts - "In 2016, we got the campaign we wanted: enough news to confuse us all"
My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World, Andrew Postman
The Judgement Of Thamus[PDF]
Science and the Story that we Need
a world without much coherence or sense. A world that does not ask us, indeed, permit us to do anything.
Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan (the former actor, he pointed out, had won a second term in a field that included another celebrity, the former astronaut John Glenn); he wrote long after Richard Nixon had made that tentative, awkward appearance on Laugh-In (“sock it to meeeee”), and slightly before a relatively obscure governor of Arkansas would prove his ability to lead the most powerful nation in the world by playing the sax on The Arsenio Hall Show. He wrote during the time when it was the newly standard practice for national politicians like George McGovern and Jesse Jackson to both prove and amplify their popularity by hosting Saturday Night Live.
The Image in the Age of Pseudo-Reality
And, so, the defining figure of the current technological and political moments—Boorstin, in the manner of his contemporaries, assumes that these moments are inextricably bound—might well be a guy who took the desiccated corpse of a monkey and called it a mermaid. It might also, however, be the many, many people who gave their money to Phineas Barnum in exchange for the thrill of being lied to. Today, living as we do in the shadow of a man who is most readily associated with gaudy circuses, Americans tend to take performance for granted as a feature of political and cultural life. We often assume that, since we ask politicians to entertain us as celebrities do, they will probably pretend like them, as well. Our leaders have, and indeed they are, “public images.” They are concerned primarily with that most ancient and modern of things: “optics.”What Huxley feard was that ther ewould be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no-one who wanted to read one (reflections on the back catalogue)
is Snapchat the sign of a post-literary future?
CNN treats politics like sports — and it’s making us all dumber
Who is The Man To Blame For Our Culture Of Fame?
The Real World: Trump Edition - "The question remains, though, how such a machine came to dominate our political landscape and control our basic political consciousness to such a point that Donald J. Trump could feasibly, actually—and successfully—run for president. Again, with so much of this ultra-mediated status quo feeling new, with so much talk of “fake news,” echo chambers, “alternative facts,” etc. tied directly to Trump’s presidency, it’s easy to lose sight of how deep and how American the roots of this historical moment are. A long history of interlocking forces made Trump’s victory possible—and made enough people desire such a victory, and distanced plenty of others from the reality of what that victory would entail, while keeping us all absolutely riveted to the process of the collective cultural manufacture of an ersatz president. That history starts with the telegraph."
The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Meet the man who predicted Fox News, the Internet, Stephen Colbert and reality TV
Perhaps most central to all of Postman’s work was the notion, which he shared with McLuhan, that technology is not neutral. “As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it,” he wrote. “Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.” Even more basically, he was concerned not just how we used our tools – gunpowder, the clock, the printing press, the television, the computer – but how our tools use us. And unlike theorists who took a detached, on-one-hand/on-the-other hand view of media, Postman made clear where his values were: “Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them.”Daniel Boorstin got it right in 'The Image'
Donald Trump, Master of the Pseudo-Event
Chaos of Facts - "In 2016, we got the campaign we wanted: enough news to confuse us all"
My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World, Andrew Postman
The Judgement Of Thamus[PDF]
Science and the Story that we Need
Am I using this technology, or is it using me?a world without much coherence or sense. A world that does not ask us, indeed, permit us to do anything.
I'm no Neil Postman but I've been expecting a Trump-like President for many years. Still, he was not in my top 5 Most Likely To Succeed, but compared to some of the others, his general incompetence seems to be reducing the amount of damage he's causing. It won't save all of us (or maybe most of us), but it may awaken enough of us to STOP us from Amusing Ourselves totally to death.
What we need is a leader like Queen Victoria... you know, "we are not amused"?
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:33 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]
What we need is a leader like Queen Victoria... you know, "we are not amused"?
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:33 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]
Neil Postman was an amazing thinker, and an amazing writer. If you haven't, do read "Amusing Ourselves to Death." And then read "The Disappearance of Childhood." You can never look at the world in the same way after you've read these books.
posted by kestralwing at 10:36 PM on May 1, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by kestralwing at 10:36 PM on May 1, 2017 [3 favorites]
Neil Postman was an amazing thinker
So you’re saying you’re a Post-fan.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:41 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]
So you’re saying you’re a Post-fan.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:41 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]
Neil Postman was an amazing thinker, and an amazing writer. If you haven't, do read "Amusing Ourselves to Death." And then read "The Disappearance of Childhood." You can never look at the world in the same way after you've read these books.
So the Postman always rings true twice?
posted by jamjam at 10:46 PM on May 1, 2017 [4 favorites]
So the Postman always rings true twice?
posted by jamjam at 10:46 PM on May 1, 2017 [4 favorites]
> A [loving] resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology--from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer--is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control.
okay but putting on my quibbling shoes for a second using this as a guide to life or whatever requires first pinning down what counts as a technology and what counts as natural/acceptable. I mean I'm gesturing to the not-quite-tenable boundary drawn between technology (which must never be accepted) and the natural order (understood as outside of and in need of protection from technology) for a reason. What I'm trying to suggest is that rather than looking for some true natural order that isn't produced by a particular economic or political context and that therefore doesn't carry with it programs, agendas, and philosophies that may or may not be life-enhancing — a sort of primitivist project — we should instead use those technologies which upon scrutiny and criticism are revealed to have embedded within them our preferred programs, agendas, and philosophies, brought under our control in order to make them shape society in life-enhancing ways. We must assess all systems for their effects in use and the way they arrange humans around them, without regard for whether or not they're part of "a natural order of things," because there is no natural order of things.
In terms of culture, we are well past the point where we can appeal to any sort of natural order. Our metabolisms are all hooked up into a global social production process that we'd be helpless without. Regardless of whether or not we are the gravediggers of capitalism, we're without a doubt its children. We were born unnatural and we have never been natural.
Hell, forget human culture though. In terms of the Earth itself we can no longer appeal to any sort of natural order — we wrecked that and it's never coming back, so now we've got to arrange what we can of the wreckage as best we can. Postman's insights into how technologies (media technologies, transportation technologies, bureaucratic technologies) work are sound; he just seems to have a sense that there's an outside to technology that isn't really there.
okay quibblin' shoes off.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:24 PM on May 1, 2017 [9 favorites]
okay but putting on my quibbling shoes for a second using this as a guide to life or whatever requires first pinning down what counts as a technology and what counts as natural/acceptable. I mean I'm gesturing to the not-quite-tenable boundary drawn between technology (which must never be accepted) and the natural order (understood as outside of and in need of protection from technology) for a reason. What I'm trying to suggest is that rather than looking for some true natural order that isn't produced by a particular economic or political context and that therefore doesn't carry with it programs, agendas, and philosophies that may or may not be life-enhancing — a sort of primitivist project — we should instead use those technologies which upon scrutiny and criticism are revealed to have embedded within them our preferred programs, agendas, and philosophies, brought under our control in order to make them shape society in life-enhancing ways. We must assess all systems for their effects in use and the way they arrange humans around them, without regard for whether or not they're part of "a natural order of things," because there is no natural order of things.
In terms of culture, we are well past the point where we can appeal to any sort of natural order. Our metabolisms are all hooked up into a global social production process that we'd be helpless without. Regardless of whether or not we are the gravediggers of capitalism, we're without a doubt its children. We were born unnatural and we have never been natural.
Hell, forget human culture though. In terms of the Earth itself we can no longer appeal to any sort of natural order — we wrecked that and it's never coming back, so now we've got to arrange what we can of the wreckage as best we can. Postman's insights into how technologies (media technologies, transportation technologies, bureaucratic technologies) work are sound; he just seems to have a sense that there's an outside to technology that isn't really there.
okay quibblin' shoes off.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:24 PM on May 1, 2017 [9 favorites]
I used to say our culture has been bubble sorting psychopaths to positions of power for a century and this is why we're in this mess but lately I've been coming round to the idea that it wasn't psychopaths but idiots.
posted by fullerine at 11:38 PM on May 1, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by fullerine at 11:38 PM on May 1, 2017 [2 favorites]
While it's certainly true that Trump's moment arrived due to many of the elements Postman and Boorstin were speaking of in regards to celebrity, television, and image, I'm not so sure that model is going to remain the dominant one for long. Indeed, I wonder if this moment isn't more a signal of its near end rather than proof of its rise.
The internet is a different thing than television in some important ways, while, of course, being similar enough in others such as fragmentation of information and dominance of image. Television goes beyond television in terms of individual engagement and scope of its reach and as such is again changing the nature of how we perceive the world.
I don't want to launch into a full blown thesis paper on the subject, and undoubtedly no one here would want that either, but, as I see it, the internet isn't increasing individual fame, but decreasing it, or rather making fame easier to acquire in smaller doses, but more difficult to build in larger quantity. In a sense, it is almost as if the internet is allowing people to return to an era of information taken in by perceived individual relevance again, where we all can pick and choose between myriad information dissemination sources and choose those we find most satisfying to our own wants or needs. This isn't, however, necessarily a better thing, but it is different than the uniformity of informational sources television provided when Postman, Boorstin, and their allies were writing.
There are a number of advantages to this change that should be noted, and which are a bit underconsidered in some of the writing by Postman etc. In comparing the television era to the past and finding it wanting in many areas, it minimizes the problems associated with disconnection between people to some degree. Mass media connected people across the country and world so, for the first time, people actually could get some idea of what was happening elsewhere in something close to real time. This wasn't just a usurpation of relevance but an expansion as well. Allowing for connections to be made that weren't possible beforehand. In control of the few, of course, these connections were limited and often shaped in ways that benefited those few, but increasingly that information is less shaped, for good and ill, and connections ever easier to make which provides some real benefit and also some serious harm.
These connections allow people who have little power to reach out and find others like them to build more. As such it may lend itself to narrowing pools of shared interests where communication in group leads social constructs that may not match out group or other group constructs of the same and where "fame" may be more limited to smaller social circles. Values that are important to one group create "rules" for conduct and belief that may not be shared outside that group, and competing claims over reality or in the hierarchic ranking of importance of different elements could further distance groups from each other, even if the people making up those different groups actually live in close proximity to each other. It changes the very idea of "local" and makes relevance a different thing than in an era where all received the same information from on high, or where geographic proximity was the most significant factor in relevance of information.
Some of the threats are the same as ever, people unwilling or unable to discriminate between informational sources and all too willing to discriminate against those who disagree with their choices. And of course wealth, power, and control are still strongly linked to each other and could pose a threat to the more unfettered access to information we currently have, but at the same time the very nature of our fracturing connections may make that unnecessary if we do drift ever further apart into our own smaller interest groups.
Many of the basic ideas and fears Postman and others before and after him have mentioned are still vitally important, but focusing too much attention on some of the specific "prophesies" of those times can miss the equally vital differences that shift the grounds of our concerns even as the overarching dilemma of finding better ways to unite people in the face of oppressive controlling forces remains as relevant as ever.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:18 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
The internet is a different thing than television in some important ways, while, of course, being similar enough in others such as fragmentation of information and dominance of image. Television goes beyond television in terms of individual engagement and scope of its reach and as such is again changing the nature of how we perceive the world.
I don't want to launch into a full blown thesis paper on the subject, and undoubtedly no one here would want that either, but, as I see it, the internet isn't increasing individual fame, but decreasing it, or rather making fame easier to acquire in smaller doses, but more difficult to build in larger quantity. In a sense, it is almost as if the internet is allowing people to return to an era of information taken in by perceived individual relevance again, where we all can pick and choose between myriad information dissemination sources and choose those we find most satisfying to our own wants or needs. This isn't, however, necessarily a better thing, but it is different than the uniformity of informational sources television provided when Postman, Boorstin, and their allies were writing.
There are a number of advantages to this change that should be noted, and which are a bit underconsidered in some of the writing by Postman etc. In comparing the television era to the past and finding it wanting in many areas, it minimizes the problems associated with disconnection between people to some degree. Mass media connected people across the country and world so, for the first time, people actually could get some idea of what was happening elsewhere in something close to real time. This wasn't just a usurpation of relevance but an expansion as well. Allowing for connections to be made that weren't possible beforehand. In control of the few, of course, these connections were limited and often shaped in ways that benefited those few, but increasingly that information is less shaped, for good and ill, and connections ever easier to make which provides some real benefit and also some serious harm.
These connections allow people who have little power to reach out and find others like them to build more. As such it may lend itself to narrowing pools of shared interests where communication in group leads social constructs that may not match out group or other group constructs of the same and where "fame" may be more limited to smaller social circles. Values that are important to one group create "rules" for conduct and belief that may not be shared outside that group, and competing claims over reality or in the hierarchic ranking of importance of different elements could further distance groups from each other, even if the people making up those different groups actually live in close proximity to each other. It changes the very idea of "local" and makes relevance a different thing than in an era where all received the same information from on high, or where geographic proximity was the most significant factor in relevance of information.
Some of the threats are the same as ever, people unwilling or unable to discriminate between informational sources and all too willing to discriminate against those who disagree with their choices. And of course wealth, power, and control are still strongly linked to each other and could pose a threat to the more unfettered access to information we currently have, but at the same time the very nature of our fracturing connections may make that unnecessary if we do drift ever further apart into our own smaller interest groups.
Many of the basic ideas and fears Postman and others before and after him have mentioned are still vitally important, but focusing too much attention on some of the specific "prophesies" of those times can miss the equally vital differences that shift the grounds of our concerns even as the overarching dilemma of finding better ways to unite people in the face of oppressive controlling forces remains as relevant as ever.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:18 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
For completeness' sake. Kelly is a great American genius.
posted by mwhybark at 1:17 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by mwhybark at 1:17 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
People tend to bristle at the idea, which makes sense because it's an idea that brushes up against the sense of one's own individual agency and feels technophobic in ways that we're acculturated not to easily accept, but it's an idea that I don't think can be dismissed based on the science of what we do know about human identity formation and information processing.
I've been worried for a long time now that the increase in the volume of information flow all these newer connectivity and communication oriented technologies have created has the potential to undermine the psychological stability of people with psychological conditions and behavioral disorders stemming from weak or unstable identity boundaries and self definitions. People who suffer certain kinds of trauma in early development may be more suggestible and prone to identity crisis as the information feedback loops that normally influence identity formation and the delicate webs of social connection that help reinforce and maintain a more stable and secure sense of one's own identity are repeatedly challenged by exposure to information that raise new doubts about our assumptions and core beliefs about who we are and what it means to be human, a citizen of a particular nation, a member of a particular demographic group, a fan of a particular genre of music, etc. There's a tension between how people want to see themselves and how others see them; that tension gets harder to negotiate and resolve, I think, on a practical level, when we're constantly feeling the beliefs that form our core sense of identity are under challenge because there's a shrinking set of common beliefs and values, that people who may be identity compromised in some way, can use to build a more resilient, less fragile sense of identity.
We don't understand everything about the psychology of identity, but what we do understand suggests identity and the experience of consciousness arises through a nonlinear feedback loop: our beliefs about ourselves and others and the quality of our conscious experiences influence how we behave when we act in the world. The social feedback we get back from the world may either work to reinforce or challenge/undermine the stability of the idea of ourselves those processes of identity construction give rise to.
For most people, who have healthy levels of self esteem and a stable core identity, that may not be catastrophic, because their sense of identity might be secure and stable enough to withstand more frequent challenges to its integrity without collapsing, but people with insecure identities or weak ego boundaries, in the psychological jargon, can easily be overwhelmed and triggered by the flood of new kinds of information feedback into varying degrees of identity crisis and dissociation, not even getting into the potential for click-addiction due to the stimulus-reward mechanisms built into the structure of how we engage with online content through standard UI conventions. The internet works like a Skinner Box with no single experimental design committee running the experiment and no particular experimental goal beyond capturing clicks and people's attentions for commercial purposes wholly indifferent to longer term, bigger picture human well-being, mental health, and sanity. It seems to me we can never be too aware of the potential for that dynamic, that it's a very real practical concern with far reaching implications that shouldn't be ignored due to the effects of sensitive dependence on initial conditions when it comes to complex nonlinear systems like the human mind and its conscious and unconscious processes.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:25 AM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
I've been worried for a long time now that the increase in the volume of information flow all these newer connectivity and communication oriented technologies have created has the potential to undermine the psychological stability of people with psychological conditions and behavioral disorders stemming from weak or unstable identity boundaries and self definitions. People who suffer certain kinds of trauma in early development may be more suggestible and prone to identity crisis as the information feedback loops that normally influence identity formation and the delicate webs of social connection that help reinforce and maintain a more stable and secure sense of one's own identity are repeatedly challenged by exposure to information that raise new doubts about our assumptions and core beliefs about who we are and what it means to be human, a citizen of a particular nation, a member of a particular demographic group, a fan of a particular genre of music, etc. There's a tension between how people want to see themselves and how others see them; that tension gets harder to negotiate and resolve, I think, on a practical level, when we're constantly feeling the beliefs that form our core sense of identity are under challenge because there's a shrinking set of common beliefs and values, that people who may be identity compromised in some way, can use to build a more resilient, less fragile sense of identity.
We don't understand everything about the psychology of identity, but what we do understand suggests identity and the experience of consciousness arises through a nonlinear feedback loop: our beliefs about ourselves and others and the quality of our conscious experiences influence how we behave when we act in the world. The social feedback we get back from the world may either work to reinforce or challenge/undermine the stability of the idea of ourselves those processes of identity construction give rise to.
For most people, who have healthy levels of self esteem and a stable core identity, that may not be catastrophic, because their sense of identity might be secure and stable enough to withstand more frequent challenges to its integrity without collapsing, but people with insecure identities or weak ego boundaries, in the psychological jargon, can easily be overwhelmed and triggered by the flood of new kinds of information feedback into varying degrees of identity crisis and dissociation, not even getting into the potential for click-addiction due to the stimulus-reward mechanisms built into the structure of how we engage with online content through standard UI conventions. The internet works like a Skinner Box with no single experimental design committee running the experiment and no particular experimental goal beyond capturing clicks and people's attentions for commercial purposes wholly indifferent to longer term, bigger picture human well-being, mental health, and sanity. It seems to me we can never be too aware of the potential for that dynamic, that it's a very real practical concern with far reaching implications that shouldn't be ignored due to the effects of sensitive dependence on initial conditions when it comes to complex nonlinear systems like the human mind and its conscious and unconscious processes.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:25 AM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
saulgoodman, you interest me strangely. One of my personal and greatest fears is of going insane by degrees, walking down a spiral ramp into madness. The internet offers so many ways to do that. You can walk into an alternate universe of your choosing as easily as you walk into the surf. I have a terrible fascination for the lives of people who have done that (cf. the Snapewives) (google advisedly). I don't have a good idea of how to prevent this while also protecting the internet's value for the ideas of the genuinely vulnerable.
I read Postman's book when I was in high school, by recommendation of a Tom Tomorrow strip. I didn't like it right away, because it was down on Sesame Street, which: no. It's unbelievably stuffy and elitist to argue against what Sesame Street can and did accomplish. Say that he wasn't wrong, though - what then? The vast majority of Americans have been watching TV since childhood. It's inextricable from us.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:41 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
I read Postman's book when I was in high school, by recommendation of a Tom Tomorrow strip. I didn't like it right away, because it was down on Sesame Street, which: no. It's unbelievably stuffy and elitist to argue against what Sesame Street can and did accomplish. Say that he wasn't wrong, though - what then? The vast majority of Americans have been watching TV since childhood. It's inextricable from us.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:41 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
I wrote this in regards to Postman in an earlier thread:
I first got on the Internet in 1993.
In the last 23 years, I've seen the Internet evolve from primarily a text based interface, which encouraged long form writing, and line-by-line-dissection of long form writing, to a medium that is primarily pictorial, and increasingly video based, where close reading of long form stuff is discouraged by code and design.
Postman himself declined even to look at the web in 1999, when I started reading his books, and he passed away in 2004. In 1999, I thought the Internet was part of the solution to the problem he was writing about. Today, the Internet is a bigger problem than television and the movies.
And the shift towards pictorial communication is rapidly approaching levels where it's a threat to civilization. Fark and Failblog are good amusements, but even the briefest look at 4chan will show you, we're in deep shit.
Rest here.
posted by ocschwar at 8:24 AM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]
I first got on the Internet in 1993.
In the last 23 years, I've seen the Internet evolve from primarily a text based interface, which encouraged long form writing, and line-by-line-dissection of long form writing, to a medium that is primarily pictorial, and increasingly video based, where close reading of long form stuff is discouraged by code and design.
Postman himself declined even to look at the web in 1999, when I started reading his books, and he passed away in 2004. In 1999, I thought the Internet was part of the solution to the problem he was writing about. Today, the Internet is a bigger problem than television and the movies.
And the shift towards pictorial communication is rapidly approaching levels where it's a threat to civilization. Fark and Failblog are good amusements, but even the briefest look at 4chan will show you, we're in deep shit.
Rest here.
posted by ocschwar at 8:24 AM on May 2, 2017 [6 favorites]
Today, the Internet is a bigger problem than television and the movies.
I kind of wish I could get my kids to watch TV, instead of an endless stream of short, humorous, YouTube videos from people who either (1) don't really know what they are talking about or (2) are talking about something ultimately pointless. Not that TV is much better, but I think it would be a small step up from YouTube, at least as they use it.
On a smaller scale, I see the same things happening with me, and I am old enough that I had a bachelor's degree before I ever went online. Around last year I started forcing myself to read whole books again, because I discovered that it was getting hard, so used was I to a diet of rapid-fire blog posts. Now I have to force myself to put the damn phone down and watch an entire hour and a half movie thoughtfully. Book-reading and criticial-movie-watching are skills I used to have and felt slipping away. I at least remembered what I used to be able to do and worked to get it back. But what happens with people who have always absorbed quick trivialities, or can't watch a movie unless it's full of one-liners and explosions? I don't know if I would have really learned to think if I had been raised with an iPad instead of paperbacks.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 8:44 AM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]
I kind of wish I could get my kids to watch TV, instead of an endless stream of short, humorous, YouTube videos from people who either (1) don't really know what they are talking about or (2) are talking about something ultimately pointless. Not that TV is much better, but I think it would be a small step up from YouTube, at least as they use it.
On a smaller scale, I see the same things happening with me, and I am old enough that I had a bachelor's degree before I ever went online. Around last year I started forcing myself to read whole books again, because I discovered that it was getting hard, so used was I to a diet of rapid-fire blog posts. Now I have to force myself to put the damn phone down and watch an entire hour and a half movie thoughtfully. Book-reading and criticial-movie-watching are skills I used to have and felt slipping away. I at least remembered what I used to be able to do and worked to get it back. But what happens with people who have always absorbed quick trivialities, or can't watch a movie unless it's full of one-liners and explosions? I don't know if I would have really learned to think if I had been raised with an iPad instead of paperbacks.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 8:44 AM on May 2, 2017 [10 favorites]
People keep talking about "connections." Watching a tv show about people in Thailand does not connect you with them. Typing 140 characters with a picture does not connect you with your friends. Posting your latest purchase on Facebook does not connect you with anything. All of these are heavily mediated. There is a great distance between you and them. A distance shaped and distorted by the media used. Connection is based on closeness, closeness to the reality you are trying to share. Having a face to face conversation with another person is as close as you can get and even that is mediated by the language you are using. Technology distorts. The perceived connections are not really there.
By the way, Postman was involved with General Semantics and I have to admit that my outlook on communications and experiencing reality are too.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:53 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
By the way, Postman was involved with General Semantics and I have to admit that my outlook on communications and experiencing reality are too.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:53 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
I think there's a pretty big gap between "TV" as it existed in the mid-late 20th c. and the media fragments we consume now. The idea of sitting down in front of a TV and just watching is something mostly boomers do. Of the Xers/borderline Millenials I know, none of them have cable or just watch whatever a broadcast channel serves up. If we watch, it's a specific show/movie, usually streamed. No one in my age cohort of my acquaintances watches you tube videos as primary entertainment. We might watch something that's been sent to us, but we don't seem to go to YouTube looking for things to watch. Social media sites have much more credibility among younger people, judging from the number of college students I encounter who accept YouTube videos as legitimate information over written sources.
Anyway, I suppose my point is that this fragmentation into smaller and smaller niches chips away at common assumptions. More educated boomers may assume the government works like The West Wing, while less educated ones may think it's The Apprentice. Either way, they've been primed by TV's structures & conventions to expect season-ending cliffhangers, but an ultimately coherent plot that puts everything back into place. Less media-literate millenials may be easily swayed by Alex Jones or 4chan memes, assuming their highly simplified vision of reality. For them, structure, plot, coherence are irrelevant, as the meme doesn't need these elements to function.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 10:40 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
Anyway, I suppose my point is that this fragmentation into smaller and smaller niches chips away at common assumptions. More educated boomers may assume the government works like The West Wing, while less educated ones may think it's The Apprentice. Either way, they've been primed by TV's structures & conventions to expect season-ending cliffhangers, but an ultimately coherent plot that puts everything back into place. Less media-literate millenials may be easily swayed by Alex Jones or 4chan memes, assuming their highly simplified vision of reality. For them, structure, plot, coherence are irrelevant, as the meme doesn't need these elements to function.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 10:40 AM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
But what happens with people who have always absorbed quick trivialities, or can't watch a movie unless it's full of one-liners and explosions? I don't know if I would have really learned to think if I had been raised with an iPad instead of paperbacks.
This is one of the conceptual problems arguments like Postman's run into at some junctures. The bias we all have is to see our history and viewpoints as more natural than those more alien to us or that challenge our ideas of "better" or even "normal".
This isn't to say the concerns expressed aren't meaningful, valid in their way, and potentially pointing out real harms, but that the culture has always contained deep flaws and caused harm to many. There was no better time in many ways since, depending on what you wish to measure, some things have always been bad, others improve, and some worsen. Cultural products like the internet, movies, and tv as much reflect the culture as drive it, so separating the cause and effects out isn't easy, though as Postman and others have pointed out the technology lends itself to certain uses and through that to certain effects more readily. Are those uses and effect worse than what you or I grew up with? I can't say. I only know the changes make me deeply uncomfortable in many ways, just as television made many before deeply uncomfortable when it was taken on as a full time amusement.
All I can say is that I'm sure the internet like tv, movies, music, and books before it will continue to effect great changes that most people likely will not even think about in any sustained effort. We're all too busy just trying to get by to fight the rising tide, especially when there is no clear gain involved in doing so. Stop television, stop the internet and things would change, but people would still be people and some would still seek to take advantage of others, accumulate power and control the discourse. I don't know what any answers are beyond my own preferences and suppositions other than perhaps the value of trying to look and think carefully about the culture whatever changes may or may not come.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:41 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
This is one of the conceptual problems arguments like Postman's run into at some junctures. The bias we all have is to see our history and viewpoints as more natural than those more alien to us or that challenge our ideas of "better" or even "normal".
This isn't to say the concerns expressed aren't meaningful, valid in their way, and potentially pointing out real harms, but that the culture has always contained deep flaws and caused harm to many. There was no better time in many ways since, depending on what you wish to measure, some things have always been bad, others improve, and some worsen. Cultural products like the internet, movies, and tv as much reflect the culture as drive it, so separating the cause and effects out isn't easy, though as Postman and others have pointed out the technology lends itself to certain uses and through that to certain effects more readily. Are those uses and effect worse than what you or I grew up with? I can't say. I only know the changes make me deeply uncomfortable in many ways, just as television made many before deeply uncomfortable when it was taken on as a full time amusement.
All I can say is that I'm sure the internet like tv, movies, music, and books before it will continue to effect great changes that most people likely will not even think about in any sustained effort. We're all too busy just trying to get by to fight the rising tide, especially when there is no clear gain involved in doing so. Stop television, stop the internet and things would change, but people would still be people and some would still seek to take advantage of others, accumulate power and control the discourse. I don't know what any answers are beyond my own preferences and suppositions other than perhaps the value of trying to look and think carefully about the culture whatever changes may or may not come.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:41 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
Hmm.. I never read Amusing Ourselves to Death. Based on the first link, I'm not drawn to. The idea that the written word is somehow inherently going to help us think critically, while the visual (or I suppose corporate-produced visual medium) is going to harm our thinking skills... I don't buy it.
I personally read a lot and watch only a little TV. The corporate aspect of TV does poison it - where everything is leveraged to sell, from embedded advertising to just the general ideology and appearance bias, but at the same time, I don't think humans are any dumber today than they were a century ago. If anything, the advent of widely-distributed literacy may have been the marker of where things really started go to shit. You could argue convincingly that people are much more informed than they have ever been in history, and television and new media (which is a combination of visual/video and text) is a huge part of that.
I can also look at our media and feel disgust and horror, and I think mass media does play a role in forming our behavior and ideology, but then other aspects of society and our own agency feed back into that media just as fast. It feels impossible to assign meaningful blame.
posted by latkes at 11:43 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
I personally read a lot and watch only a little TV. The corporate aspect of TV does poison it - where everything is leveraged to sell, from embedded advertising to just the general ideology and appearance bias, but at the same time, I don't think humans are any dumber today than they were a century ago. If anything, the advent of widely-distributed literacy may have been the marker of where things really started go to shit. You could argue convincingly that people are much more informed than they have ever been in history, and television and new media (which is a combination of visual/video and text) is a huge part of that.
I can also look at our media and feel disgust and horror, and I think mass media does play a role in forming our behavior and ideology, but then other aspects of society and our own agency feed back into that media just as fast. It feels impossible to assign meaningful blame.
posted by latkes at 11:43 AM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
The idea that the written word is somehow inherently going to help us think critically, while the visual (or I suppose corporate-produced visual medium) is going to harm our thinking skills... I don't buy it.
Buy it or not, intuitively, completely different subsystems of the brain are involved in the two. Even if you don't buy that visual symbolic processing is better or worse than more abstract thinking, it's trivial to prove they involve very different kinds of cognitive function, and engage very different neurological mechanisms and processes.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:16 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
Buy it or not, intuitively, completely different subsystems of the brain are involved in the two. Even if you don't buy that visual symbolic processing is better or worse than more abstract thinking, it's trivial to prove they involve very different kinds of cognitive function, and engage very different neurological mechanisms and processes.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:16 PM on May 2, 2017 [2 favorites]
The organization of thought, the mapping out and sustaining of points in a written argument are far far more complex and nuanced (usually) that what can be achieved via video. Video tends to bypass a crucial part of the audience's role in constructing the knowledge they're being asked to understand. Without that filter of active assistance in constructing meaning, video can rocket straight to the lizard brain. I mean, just look at how many people were taken by the incoherent jumble of that "Loose Change" video. Or, for a less moronic example, how Adam Curtis combines loose associations with video to make some pretty big leaps of cause-and-effect that might not hold if they were presented in just the written word. Writing/reading is a form of thinking. That's why you have to do so much of it to get an education.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:37 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:37 PM on May 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
The organization of thought, the mapping out and sustaining of points in a written argument are far far more complex and nuanced (usually) that what can be achieved via video. Video tends to bypass a crucial part of the audience's role in constructing the knowledge they're being asked to understand.
Which is why 9/11 types, holocaust deniers, antivaxxers, et cetera love the medium.
Write your stuff down, and your reader will go 3 lines in, fact check something and call you out.
Put it in a video, your viewer won't.
posted by ocschwar at 2:01 PM on May 2, 2017 [4 favorites]
Buy it or not, intuitively, completely different subsystems of the brain are involved in the two. Even if you don't buy that visual symbolic processing is better or worse than more abstract thinking, it's trivial to prove they involve very different kinds of cognitive function, and engage very different neurological mechanisms and processes.
posted by saulgoodman An hour ago [1 favorite +] [!]
However, there is no conclusive data that you can see a behavioral result of our differing intake of video vs text. Any theories about video/TV having a causal impact on our behavior are very speculative; they'd be very challenging to study scientifically, but also, even just our observational data don't make a compelling case to me. If anything, society is less violent than it used to be, and in certain respects we have made enormous social strides. I just don't see evidence that our steadily increasing intake of video as a format has made society worse in the ways described above.
I'm not saying things are good: but I think for the most part they're just differently bad than they used to be.
posted by latkes at 2:39 PM on May 2, 2017
posted by saulgoodman An hour ago [1 favorite +] [!]
However, there is no conclusive data that you can see a behavioral result of our differing intake of video vs text. Any theories about video/TV having a causal impact on our behavior are very speculative; they'd be very challenging to study scientifically, but also, even just our observational data don't make a compelling case to me. If anything, society is less violent than it used to be, and in certain respects we have made enormous social strides. I just don't see evidence that our steadily increasing intake of video as a format has made society worse in the ways described above.
I'm not saying things are good: but I think for the most part they're just differently bad than they used to be.
posted by latkes at 2:39 PM on May 2, 2017
". I'm not saying things are good: but I think for the most part they're just differently bad than they used to be.
posted by latkes at 9:39 PM on May 2 [+] [!]
"
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” - Animal Farm by George Orwell
Hmm ??
posted by Faintdreams at 4:28 PM on May 2, 2017
Uh.. I'm Stalin for saying things are in many ways better than they used to be?
posted by latkes at 4:41 PM on May 2, 2017
posted by latkes at 4:41 PM on May 2, 2017
However, there is no conclusive data that you can see a behavioral result of our differing intake of video vs text.
This seems quite overconfident - I've got stuff on today so I can't go digging through the scholarship, but I recall a study that suggested that teenagers who primarily interacted through screens were significantly less empathetic than those who used it as a supplement to face-to-face interaction. This is obviously not at all the same thing, but it's clearly a reasonable question to ask whether our media consumption today has an effect on our cognition, instead of dismissing it out of hand.
posted by Merus at 7:02 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
This seems quite overconfident - I've got stuff on today so I can't go digging through the scholarship, but I recall a study that suggested that teenagers who primarily interacted through screens were significantly less empathetic than those who used it as a supplement to face-to-face interaction. This is obviously not at all the same thing, but it's clearly a reasonable question to ask whether our media consumption today has an effect on our cognition, instead of dismissing it out of hand.
posted by Merus at 7:02 PM on May 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
As to having an effect on our cognition do you mean how we think/process input mediated through our senses? Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, was the guy who said "the map is not the territory." What we experience are maps, the most immediate being our senses. Books, films, paintings, the internet, etc are all just higher form maps. Step one is realizing this. Step two is starting to question how good the maps are. Media literacy is understanding how media present information and how it can distort information. It's a guide to understanding how the maps work. And how they don't work. The problem today is that media literacy is not a very common tool and rarely adequately taught. If at all.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:52 PM on May 2, 2017
posted by njohnson23 at 7:52 PM on May 2, 2017
Depends on your country; media literacy is a core component of Australian literature education, for instance.
posted by Merus at 8:15 PM on May 2, 2017
posted by Merus at 8:15 PM on May 2, 2017
This is obviously not at all the same thing, but it's clearly a reasonable question to ask whether our media consumption today has an effect on our cognition, instead of dismissing it out of hand.
Yes, the question is a reasonable one as are the concerns, but I think part of what also needs to be taken into account is in trying to better define what it is that one is trying to measure or what end goal one is holding as an obtainable ideal.
Take the question about empathy for example, is it simply the case more empathy would be better? From what base is the measure being looked at and to what end? One could wonder, for instance, if empathy increasing in face to face contact means a greater likelihood of aligning oneself strongly with people nearby or who are most like you at the expense of those one has minimal or no contact with. Empathy in that way might be thought of as being deep but narrow, while it may be better for a greater number of people if empathy was shallow but broad, which is to say one experienced some empathy for more people, even those one might never see face to face, rather than more empathy for fewer people who one encounters daily. Or not, it's trying to measure an abstract without a defined end purpose. That doesn't mean the measure isn't saying something meaningful, but that looking at it from a position of past experience may not be providing the best base to evaluate future possibilities.
Millennials, by some studies, are less prejudiced then the generations that preceded them, more accepting of equal status for racial minorities and GLBTQ individuals. One can speculate on the reasons why that might be the case, if it indeed is as it appears to be, but it is difficult to assert changes in media consumption for that group by this measure has made things worse. The same may be said about other social changes like violence, where declines in rates of violence have gone along with these changes in media consumption. There may not be any clear or even real cause and effect between those things, but violence lessening surely isn't a negative effect of that media, either in the simple fact of it or as a consequence of that engagement.
Even talk about changes in media consumption can be remarkably imprecise. It is unlikely, for example, that young people today are actually reading less text than generations before given texting is a major form of communication, so it's more what type of texts are being read, or not read. The talk about imagery too can be a bit fuzzy, where we've come to recognize the value in having graphic aids to help better understand statistics and still find a good illustration can capture something more or different than hundreds of words might. It isn't just about processing images and texts differently, which we do, but in taking in information from sources that have points of view that may be disagreeable or based in falsehoods, but that was as true of text as image and no less easy to accomplish.
Sources like Alex Jones aren't succeeding due to their mastery of images, he relies on speech, the earliest form of communication, but uses the internet to expand the reach of his monologues. Focusing on the form of communication rather than the method of transmission is missing the point a bit as would be making claims against the internet based on people like Jones alone without taking into account the many others who also have found audiences but with words that are more appealing to our sense of a greater good.
The very nature of communication makes trying to define values around it difficult as any claim made tends to have broad and variable impact depending on who is looking or listening. So the cautionary warnings have to be looked at as coming from their own point of view which holds its own biases. There is much to feel uneasy about in times of change since it isn't clear where things will go or what will be lost in getting there. Reading Postman and others like him is valuable less because of their attitude about media itself and more for the detailed process with which they engage the question. I don't know whether there is even a "right" answer to these sorts of questions, or if it would matter since these kinds of media are not going anywhere no matter how one feels about them, but looking at media and what and how it transmits information is extremely valuable when done with the sort of care Postman and others bring to the issue.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:47 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]
Yes, the question is a reasonable one as are the concerns, but I think part of what also needs to be taken into account is in trying to better define what it is that one is trying to measure or what end goal one is holding as an obtainable ideal.
Take the question about empathy for example, is it simply the case more empathy would be better? From what base is the measure being looked at and to what end? One could wonder, for instance, if empathy increasing in face to face contact means a greater likelihood of aligning oneself strongly with people nearby or who are most like you at the expense of those one has minimal or no contact with. Empathy in that way might be thought of as being deep but narrow, while it may be better for a greater number of people if empathy was shallow but broad, which is to say one experienced some empathy for more people, even those one might never see face to face, rather than more empathy for fewer people who one encounters daily. Or not, it's trying to measure an abstract without a defined end purpose. That doesn't mean the measure isn't saying something meaningful, but that looking at it from a position of past experience may not be providing the best base to evaluate future possibilities.
Millennials, by some studies, are less prejudiced then the generations that preceded them, more accepting of equal status for racial minorities and GLBTQ individuals. One can speculate on the reasons why that might be the case, if it indeed is as it appears to be, but it is difficult to assert changes in media consumption for that group by this measure has made things worse. The same may be said about other social changes like violence, where declines in rates of violence have gone along with these changes in media consumption. There may not be any clear or even real cause and effect between those things, but violence lessening surely isn't a negative effect of that media, either in the simple fact of it or as a consequence of that engagement.
Even talk about changes in media consumption can be remarkably imprecise. It is unlikely, for example, that young people today are actually reading less text than generations before given texting is a major form of communication, so it's more what type of texts are being read, or not read. The talk about imagery too can be a bit fuzzy, where we've come to recognize the value in having graphic aids to help better understand statistics and still find a good illustration can capture something more or different than hundreds of words might. It isn't just about processing images and texts differently, which we do, but in taking in information from sources that have points of view that may be disagreeable or based in falsehoods, but that was as true of text as image and no less easy to accomplish.
Sources like Alex Jones aren't succeeding due to their mastery of images, he relies on speech, the earliest form of communication, but uses the internet to expand the reach of his monologues. Focusing on the form of communication rather than the method of transmission is missing the point a bit as would be making claims against the internet based on people like Jones alone without taking into account the many others who also have found audiences but with words that are more appealing to our sense of a greater good.
The very nature of communication makes trying to define values around it difficult as any claim made tends to have broad and variable impact depending on who is looking or listening. So the cautionary warnings have to be looked at as coming from their own point of view which holds its own biases. There is much to feel uneasy about in times of change since it isn't clear where things will go or what will be lost in getting there. Reading Postman and others like him is valuable less because of their attitude about media itself and more for the detailed process with which they engage the question. I don't know whether there is even a "right" answer to these sorts of questions, or if it would matter since these kinds of media are not going anywhere no matter how one feels about them, but looking at media and what and how it transmits information is extremely valuable when done with the sort of care Postman and others bring to the issue.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:47 AM on May 3, 2017 [3 favorites]
okay but putting on my quibbling shoes for a second
You have provided a truly excellent example of how the form (a Metafilter post and comment) controls not only how the content is expressed, but what sort of thinking could be expressed, and are considered valuable.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:18 PM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]
You have provided a truly excellent example of how the form (a Metafilter post and comment) controls not only how the content is expressed, but what sort of thinking could be expressed, and are considered valuable.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:18 PM on May 3, 2017 [1 favorite]
-Feudalism and the "Algorithmic Economy"
-The Threat
-The Robots Have Taken Over (Our Brains)
-Not OK, Google/Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly
-The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data/Data is giving rise to a new economy/Beware the digital hand
-The Dystopian Future of Price Discrimination/How the Robot Apocalypse Will Go Down (more Cathy O'Neil)
-"Before industrial civilization, local and regional communities made their own music, their own entertainment. The aesthetics were based on traditions that went far back in time—i.e. folklore. But part of the con of mass culture is to make you forget history, disconnect you from tradition and the past. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Sometimes it can even be revolutionary. But tradition can also keep culture on an authentic human level, the homespun as opposed to the mass produced. Industrial civilization figured out how to manufacture popular culture and sell it back to the people. You have to marvel at the ingenuity of it! The problem is that the longer this buying and selling goes on, the more hollow and bankrupt the culture becomes. It loses its fertility, like worn out, ravaged farmland. Eventually, the yokels who bought the hype, the pitch, they want in on the game. When there are no more naive hicks left, you have a culture where everybody is conning each other all the time. There are no more earnest 'squares' left—everybody's 'hip', everybody is cynical." --r. crumb :P
posted by kliuless at 11:46 PM on May 8, 2017
-The Threat
-The Robots Have Taken Over (Our Brains)
-Not OK, Google/Facebook and the Cost of Monopoly
-The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data/Data is giving rise to a new economy/Beware the digital hand
-The Dystopian Future of Price Discrimination/How the Robot Apocalypse Will Go Down (more Cathy O'Neil)
-"Before industrial civilization, local and regional communities made their own music, their own entertainment. The aesthetics were based on traditions that went far back in time—i.e. folklore. But part of the con of mass culture is to make you forget history, disconnect you from tradition and the past. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Sometimes it can even be revolutionary. But tradition can also keep culture on an authentic human level, the homespun as opposed to the mass produced. Industrial civilization figured out how to manufacture popular culture and sell it back to the people. You have to marvel at the ingenuity of it! The problem is that the longer this buying and selling goes on, the more hollow and bankrupt the culture becomes. It loses its fertility, like worn out, ravaged farmland. Eventually, the yokels who bought the hype, the pitch, they want in on the game. When there are no more naive hicks left, you have a culture where everybody is conning each other all the time. There are no more earnest 'squares' left—everybody's 'hip', everybody is cynical." --r. crumb :P
posted by kliuless at 11:46 PM on May 8, 2017
A design flaw in Slack and WhatsApp is creating a uniquely 21st-century etiquette problem - "Putting a stranglehold on attention without users' consent is a classic mistake in tech design. What the perennially quotable Seth Godin wrote almost a decade ago still holds: The designers and marketers who seek permission are those who '[realize] that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.' "
A TV show about living gods is bringing America's favorite deities—Fame and Technology—to life - " 'Time and attention—better than lamb's blood', said Media, in the second episode of American Gods, broadcast in the US yesterday. The character from the 2001 Neil Gaiman novel, which is now a Starz TV series, was more prescient than the author could have imagined."
Land, Capital, Attention: This Time It Is the Same - "Where is the new scarcity? It is human attention... Increasingly you can measure how valuable something is by how much attention it controls (e.g., Google, Facebook, etc). And just like previous scarcities one of the reasons that attention is scarce is that we are bad at this new technology. As society we have lots of information locked up through copyright and patents instead of making it available to everyone. As individuals we too often lack a purpose other than making money and we will happily watch another cat video in our limited free time than read a challenging book. Over time we will get better at all of this and it will let us achieve amazing things as humanity, including free education and healthcare for everyone and cleaning up the mess we have made of the planet. But none of that will happen as long as we keep ourselves trapped in a belief that capital is scarce and that everyone needs a job. So yes, this time is the same. Once again technology is fundamentally shifting scarcity and the ruling elites are controlled by the prior scarcity, this time capital, which is trying hard to maintain its power. The sooner we all begin to understand this, the better our chances of a peaceful transition. The longer we wait, the more we will be like the land owners who didn't get industrialization and led us down a path of violent change."*
posted by kliuless at 12:00 AM on May 9, 2017
A TV show about living gods is bringing America's favorite deities—Fame and Technology—to life - " 'Time and attention—better than lamb's blood', said Media, in the second episode of American Gods, broadcast in the US yesterday. The character from the 2001 Neil Gaiman novel, which is now a Starz TV series, was more prescient than the author could have imagined."
Land, Capital, Attention: This Time It Is the Same - "Where is the new scarcity? It is human attention... Increasingly you can measure how valuable something is by how much attention it controls (e.g., Google, Facebook, etc). And just like previous scarcities one of the reasons that attention is scarce is that we are bad at this new technology. As society we have lots of information locked up through copyright and patents instead of making it available to everyone. As individuals we too often lack a purpose other than making money and we will happily watch another cat video in our limited free time than read a challenging book. Over time we will get better at all of this and it will let us achieve amazing things as humanity, including free education and healthcare for everyone and cleaning up the mess we have made of the planet. But none of that will happen as long as we keep ourselves trapped in a belief that capital is scarce and that everyone needs a job. So yes, this time is the same. Once again technology is fundamentally shifting scarcity and the ruling elites are controlled by the prior scarcity, this time capital, which is trying hard to maintain its power. The sooner we all begin to understand this, the better our chances of a peaceful transition. The longer we wait, the more we will be like the land owners who didn't get industrialization and led us down a path of violent change."*
posted by kliuless at 12:00 AM on May 9, 2017
« Older Bohemian Rhapsody- Pentatonix/Queen | "Kiss me Frank, I'm going" Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
A [loving] resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every technology--from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer--is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:12 PM on May 1, 2017 [6 favorites]