I was going to make a thread on this topic or really a related topic, but thought this is a good place for comment and original thought.
Jury duty recently brought me back to a world I am missing with telecommuting and my slow easing out of corporate America. The modern world of digital loneliness. It used to be people would sit eyes in book, closed, most seemingly unaware of their neighbor on public transportation. Today they are glued to phone or ipad or ? Since I have lived in that world from its beginning, it has changed sectors of America, the educated sector or the well to do sector or the city experiences sector. I am not sure of the rest? I say this because the rest (vague word) seem to use the same technology for a different purpose or to create another reality or to support another reality. Original thought below - read the piece by Lanier, excellent thoughtful stuff.
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It is a truism that the best slavery is not knowing you are a slave. When I watch entertainment television I often think of this truism - who watches this stuff I wonder. What does it do to the mind when all of life is absurd comedic situations, crime scene investigations, or macho law enforcement dramas? Add ads for cures of all and every thing life throws at us and soon everything is a drug by whatever name you choose. So this past week while doing America's finest civic duty, jury duty, I traveled into a world I have missed for several years. It is a world changed. It is a world in which everyone has a Internet device and everyone is texting all the time. There are a few readers but they are the minority. Could it be that corporate media has finally made slavery comfortable, desire a text away, and community happiness a far off imaginary thing. Has the natural world disappeared and the world of digital existence replaced it. Is it any wonder religious community remains the last place we can touch and feel life. (I am not a religious person.) Interesting piece below.
"I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s."
"The most complex and important part of the interview concerns what Lanier calls the "local-global flip." This term refers to what happens when a company -- Wal-Mart, Google and Apple are his three main examples -- conquer certain sectors of the economy quickly and completely, and their dominance over that sector is so complete that it creates a stranglehold over that part of the market, effectively destroys the so-called "Mom-and-Pop" vendors that used to coexist with it, and turns those companies into gateways that control how other people get their goods, services or ideas into the marketplace."
How the Internet is destroying the middle class - Internet Culture - Salon.com
The Local-global Flip, Or, "the Lanier Effect" | Conversation | Edge
Jaron Lanier | Profile at Edge
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley wrote in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984 Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us...This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." Neil Postman 'Amusing Ourselves to Death'
