Oh my gosh, do 5 and 6 resonate with me! I was a kid in the 70s and 80s and went to college in the late 80s. I struggle to recall how my roommates and I were never at a loss for words and spent so much time together. We didn’t have any distractions or devices when we were out and only had a TV in our apartment. I tell my kids about how much fun we had, yet I’m utterly dumbfounded as to how that could ever be recreated in today’s world. Our minds would need a complete overhaul. And I don’t mean to say that we had a lot of deep and intellectual conversations, I just mean that we could have fun without the crutch of a cell phone or internet connection.
Neil Postman was brilliant. Thank you for bringing attention to his work. One of my most favorite books of his (with Charles Weingartner) was Teaching as a Subversive Activity:
From what I read about Aldous Huxley is he wasn’t so much prescient as he was instructive. After all he is the son of Julian Huxley who supported eugenics & advocated for a “scientific world humanism”. Considering Aldous Huxley’s upbringing is by a man who coined the term “transhumanism”, it appears he was more of a gifted stenographer.
It's all so well worth thinking about, this sudden change in discourse.
But what about adaptation? The first person who could afford to read in a corner with a candle was part of a radical change in discourse. So what about me and now?
I'm finding that, despite my refusal to watch any TV, carry a phone or sit in EMF saturated premises, I am nonetheless spending much time seated at a screen and dealing with loads of information/entertainment/opinion. I'm doing it right now, am I not?
So I'm opting to adjust, to adapt. The net is full of good sound-only material, or material easily converted to sound-only. At age 75 I can still walk and do outdoor work. Portable speakers and WIRED mp3 players allow me to listen to masses of worthwhile material. The languages I could always read but seldom hear in the Australian bush are now available to me every day. (Guys, the history lectures by the likes of Alessandro Barbero and Eva Tobalina are a treasure!). I'm no longer confined to a few statist radio channels (and they've all been statist forever, since the first broadcast).
Doors have been shutting but others have opened. We make a mistake to shut the door on pure reading and spoken conversation...but there are some newly opened doors worth going through.
Oh my gosh, do 5 and 6 resonate with me! I was a kid in the 70s and 80s and went to college in the late 80s. I struggle to recall how my roommates and I were never at a loss for words and spent so much time together. We didn’t have any distractions or devices when we were out and only had a TV in our apartment. I tell my kids about how much fun we had, yet I’m utterly dumbfounded as to how that could ever be recreated in today’s world. Our minds would need a complete overhaul. And I don’t mean to say that we had a lot of deep and intellectual conversations, I just mean that we could have fun without the crutch of a cell phone or internet connection.
Neil Postman was brilliant. Thank you for bringing attention to his work. One of my most favorite books of his (with Charles Weingartner) was Teaching as a Subversive Activity:
https://archive.org/details/teaching-as-a-subversive-activity/page/114/mode/2up
From what I read about Aldous Huxley is he wasn’t so much prescient as he was instructive. After all he is the son of Julian Huxley who supported eugenics & advocated for a “scientific world humanism”. Considering Aldous Huxley’s upbringing is by a man who coined the term “transhumanism”, it appears he was more of a gifted stenographer.
It's all so well worth thinking about, this sudden change in discourse.
But what about adaptation? The first person who could afford to read in a corner with a candle was part of a radical change in discourse. So what about me and now?
I'm finding that, despite my refusal to watch any TV, carry a phone or sit in EMF saturated premises, I am nonetheless spending much time seated at a screen and dealing with loads of information/entertainment/opinion. I'm doing it right now, am I not?
So I'm opting to adjust, to adapt. The net is full of good sound-only material, or material easily converted to sound-only. At age 75 I can still walk and do outdoor work. Portable speakers and WIRED mp3 players allow me to listen to masses of worthwhile material. The languages I could always read but seldom hear in the Australian bush are now available to me every day. (Guys, the history lectures by the likes of Alessandro Barbero and Eva Tobalina are a treasure!). I'm no longer confined to a few statist radio channels (and they've all been statist forever, since the first broadcast).
Doors have been shutting but others have opened. We make a mistake to shut the door on pure reading and spoken conversation...but there are some newly opened doors worth going through.