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Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)

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Re: Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)

#91

Post by Nasrudith »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #31
portaouflop wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as long as Global Human Attention isn't given purpose We tried out the grand visions to improve the human condition with one great push in the 20th century- didn’t work out so well

The failure of some grand visions doesn’t doom all future ones. That’s just silly.

Grand visions are more in service of megalomaniacal egos than actual solutions. They all just paint over the very real complexities of the world and expect things to just work as they envisioned. Just get rid of the sparrows eating grains and it will just be fine! There are limits to what complexities can be contained within one human mind, and with a world already orders of magnitudes more complex than that we need the humility to admit that the vision of one human mind is not and cannot be all-encompassing. I think it is fair to say that the usefulness of grand visions is dead.

Re: Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)

#92

Post by [deleted] »

judofyr wrote: post #45
alexashka wrote: post #22

Thinly veiled 'I despise stupid people', this one. They'd be boozing (more than they already are) if there wasn't such variety of cheap and available entertainment, the author doesn't seem to realize? It's not what stupid people do in their free time - it's what capable and smart people value and pursue that makes all the difference. Nietzsche laid this out quite beautifully in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Huxley and Orwe…

> Thinly veiled 'I despise stupid people', this one. Are you talking about this comic (i.e. a few sentences from the book) or the whole book? I read the book a few years back and it's entirely focused on culture as a whole and less about the individual choices. He's not making a point of "television makes you dumb" (or "dumb people watches television"), but rather he makes the distinction between an "oral"-, "press"-…

[deleted]

Re: Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)

#93

Post by yungporko »

alexashka wrote: post #22

Thinly veiled 'I despise stupid people', this one. They'd be boozing (more than they already are) if there wasn't such variety of cheap and available entertainment, the author doesn't seem to realize? It's not what stupid people do in their free time - it's what capable and smart people value and pursue that makes all the difference. Nietzsche laid this out quite beautifully in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Huxley and Orwe…

plenty of smart people wasting their lives scrolling through bullshit. you don't use your brain to solve problems if you're never bored and allowing your mind to wander.

Re: Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)

#96

Post by 082349872349872 »

anthk wrote: post #73
082349872349872 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with BNW? Have you forgotten the islands?

On "The Island", well, it's the book Huxley wrote as a counterpart against BNW.

The islands in BNW: "[Bernard is] being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."

Re: Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)

#98

Post by fallous »

cen4 wrote: post #19

Think more about Attention. Not about Information. Information is exploding and global available Attention doesn't grow. People who pay attention to one thing, can't use the same time to pay attention to something else. So govts and corps fight over this common pool of Attention using the Media (TV/Movies/Radio/Social/News/Sports/Gaming etc etc), just like they fought over land and oil and other natural resources. Me…

Arguably religion used to provide that purpose but most of the Western world has walked away from it without choosing something to replace that sense of purpose. If, as Marx asserted, that religion was the opiate of the masses then the current "attention economy" is the methamphetamine of the masses.

Re: Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)

#99

Post by hoppyhoppy2 »

HellDunkel wrote: post #77

A couple of years ago i was working for a design studio which produced an image movie for a big cooperation which somehow painted an utopian future for their upcoming product ideas. In that movie there was a woman reading in "Brave new World".[EDITED] It was clear none of the people involved read the book. My remarks were swept aside by claiming hardly anyone has read the book anyway... headlessness might be a real i…

Do you mean "Brave New World"?

Re: Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)

#100

Post by quartesixte »

judofyr wrote: post #61
quartesixte wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He's not making a point of "television makes you dumb" (or "dumb people watches television"), but rather he makes the distinction between an "oral"-, "press"- and "television"-based culture. He claims that it's bad when television becomes the main platform that a society centers its communication around. Or as Postman himself put it, "the medium is the metaphor". And he strongly disliked the metaphor TV was bringing…

> And everyone should note this is the television of the 1980s. You still don't really have home recording, there are a limited number of channels, and the monoculture truly exists. This is a good point as well! When reading it I was reflecting on how internet compares to 1980s television. Yes, it has much more dopamine-fueled content, but it's way less of a monoculture. It gives a lot of opportunity for people to se…

You also can't create actively yourself! TV was definitely a consumer only culture, with all creation heavily gatekept by an entire industry. Compare this to the print culture prior to that.

The Internet definitely has changed this, and now we are back into a creation capable metaphor.

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