There's room for some gap analysis in that binary thinking. And when something isn't "either/or" its much harder to point at where it's wrong or bothersome.
I completely agree, and have said similar; albeit not as eloquently.
Still however, the questions remain: what can we do about it? Is it already too late?
Oh, and is posting something like this blog a legal grounds for a charge of sedition, in the age of homeland security? After all, we waited for "thought crime" to be legislateable, yet lacking the technology to police it means "thinking at all" is on the cusp of being a criminal offense.....
You say "we have a culture" as if we have only one.
There's a culture in the back streets of LA, and a completely different one with different values in rural Iowa. You might say they are very connected, but only in the same way that they are both connected to culture of the reindeer herders in Russia. Each culture has its extremists. Fox News certainly highlights them, but there's probably more of a sliding scale.
Also, both Orwell and BNW controlled people by controlling communication (using pain or pleasure at the individual level, of course). The goofballs on the internet and texting masses of teens actually may be a ray of hope.
I've read some of Postman's essays -- I actually have one called "Informing Ourselves to Death," which is a short one on essentially the same topic, in the research folder for the novel I've been working on. He's easy to dismiss as a luddite, or just an eloquent curmudgeon, but he definitely has some interesting points. It's possible today, more than ever before, to be getting more information than one can read in a day entirely from sources chosen, consciously or not, to reinforce our biases. And because those sources often claim to honestly analyze opposing viewpoints, it's easy to imagine that you know what "the other side" actually believes, rather than what people who you already agree with believe the other side believes.
I think Postman would probably agree with your observation that it isn't either/or, though. He'd probably say that nothing is. As he wrote in "Informing":
Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away
( ... )
Except that that printing press example is almost entirely horseshit. Claims about the medieval senses of community and social integration are almost entirely unverifiable, but works like the Decameron (~1353) strongly suggest that the social changes wrought by the Black Death at least started eroding the medieval social order long before printing was practical. Science stayed closely bound to religion at least as far as Newton and arguably right up to Darwin, and poetry was quite strong until WWI or thereabouts.
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Still however, the questions remain:
what can we do about it?
Is it already too late?
Oh, and is posting something like this blog a legal grounds for a charge of sedition, in the age of homeland security?
After all, we waited for "thought crime" to be legislateable, yet lacking the technology to police it means "thinking at all" is on the cusp of being a criminal offense.....
Reply
Reply
There's a culture in the back streets of LA, and a completely different one with different values in rural Iowa. You might say they are very connected, but only in the same way that they are both connected to culture of the reindeer herders in Russia. Each culture has its extremists. Fox News certainly highlights them, but there's probably more of a sliding scale.
Also, both Orwell and BNW controlled people by controlling communication (using pain or pleasure at the individual level, of course). The goofballs on the internet and texting masses of teens actually may be a ray of hope.
Reply
I think Postman would probably agree with your observation that it isn't either/or, though. He'd probably say that nothing is. As he wrote in "Informing":
Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away ( ... )
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