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Technology is Heroin - What To Fix
by Lost at 1:24 am EST, Feb 8, 2009 |
Everything back then took work and time. In rural America, it wasn't unusual to walk five miles to a friend's house to play a few games of checkers. Life was monotonous and physically challenging. In the countryside there was no plumbing and electricity hadn't been invented yet. You spent a lot of time hauling around water, chopping firewood, planting and tending crops. It took nearly continuous physical activity. Leisure was no different: it took time, work, and active minds. Want to socialize, hang out with the buds? It was a big deal, a special day. You'd either walk a ways or get on your horse and ride. If it were a really big day, like election, you'd hitch the wagon up to the plow team. It was a lot of work and hassle, but eventually you'd end up at the dance, the election, the church, the pub, or wherever. There would be drinking and story-telling ugoing on for hours on end. Hey -- these were your friends and it took a lot of hassle to spend time with them. For instance, when the American Colonies were formed, Ben Franklin and a few other delegates threw a kegger before everybody else arrived that went on for several days. ... Technology is Heroin. It's still very early. We're still in the phase of expecting some even better technology to come along and save us from this problem. Programmers are creating "no procrastinate" options for their web sites in order to help users not spend so much time there. Programs are being written to track online time to show users where they are spending all of their energy. The new addictive program will eliminate the ills of the old one. Meanwhile, people get fatter and fatter, unable to get around or physically accomplish normal chores from a 100 years ago. Intelligence is going down as fewer and fewer books are being read (news flash: the printed book industry is on the way out unless this trend stops), and social organizations like churches and civic clubs see fewer and fewer members attend their meetings. The skills that are increasing? Reflex time. Ability to solve abstract, short-timespan problems. Basically the skills we need to interact with our entertainment. More and more, Indians and Chinese -- people coming from cultures who have been shut out of the technical world until recently -- are writing software for hardcore western appetites to consume.
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RE: Technology is Heroin - What To Fix
by Decius at 8:06 am EST, Feb 8, 2009 |
Jello wrote:
Intelligence is going down as fewer and fewer books are being read (news flash: the printed book industry is on the way out unless this trend stops),
This sort of hand wringing about books is the clarion call of the luddite. Books are a media. There are other media. The idea that books are a media that is intellectually superior to other media is something that children were told in the 70's when their choices were reading or watching television. The idea here was that if you taught children to read novels that they would be better equiped to read news papers, research papers, reference books, and technical books when they grew up. People who are still clinging to the superiority of novels, particularly in the context of adults and not children, don't know what they are talking about. In the wake of online communications this belief is totally bunk. The value of novels isn't inherent. The value of reading is what is important. The internet offers lots of things to read and a lot people who spend time reading the internet are reading. Its literacy that is important and not books. The one does not require the other. Fortunately, this particular luddic screed dropped the typical waxing on about the smell of books or the way that paper feels, but its no different. The problem is the presumption that you can't learn anything useful from other media. Thats just wrong. |
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RE: Technology is Heroin - What To Fix
by noteworthy at 10:24 am EST, Feb 8, 2009 |
Daniel at What To Fix wrote: Intelligence is going down as fewer and fewer books are being read (news flash: the printed book industry is on the way out unless this trend stops),
Decius wrote: This sort of hand wringing about books is the clarion call of the luddite. Books are a media. There are other media.
Daniel seems not to have read (ha!) the latest NEA report: For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read. "At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading (*) has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable."
(*) "Such reading may have involved print or online materials—the questions place no strictures on the format."
Also: "In this report, 'literary' reading refers to the reading of any novels, short stories, poems, or plays in print or online."
Regarding Daniel's urgent plea to save the "printed book industry", a bit of history is in order. From 1876, here's the NYT: The telephone, by bringing music and ministries into every home, will empty the concert-halls and the churches.
And from 1877, also in the NYT: The telephone was justly regarded as an ingenious invention when it was first brought before the public, but it is destined to be entirely eclipsed by the new invention of the phonograph.
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RE: Technology is Heroin - What To Fix
by ubernoir at 12:02 pm EST, Feb 8, 2009 |
Decius wrote: Jello wrote:
Intelligence is going down as fewer and fewer books are being read (news flash: the printed book industry is on the way out unless this trend stops),
This sort of hand wringing about books is the clarion call of the luddite. Books are a media. There are other media. The idea that books are a media that is intellectually superior to other media is something that children were told in the 70's when their choices were reading or watching television. The idea here was that if you taught children to read novels that they would be better equiped to read news papers, research papers, reference books, and technical books when they grew up. People who are still clinging to the superiority of novels, particularly in the context of adults and not children, don't know what they are talking about. In the wake of online communications this belief is totally bunk. The value of novels isn't inherent. The value of reading is what is important. The internet offers lots of things to read and a lot people who spend time reading the internet are reading. Its literacy that is important and not books. The one does not require the other. Fortunately, this particular luddic screed dropped the typical waxing on about the smell of books or the way that paper feels, but its no different. The problem is the presumption that you can't learn anything useful from other media. Thats just wrong.
I like papyrus and epic poetry written on vellum but then I'm kinda anti-fashion |
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RE: Technology is Heroin - What To Fix
by noteworthy at 12:37 pm EST, Feb 8, 2009 |
Daniel at What To Fix wrote: Technology is Heroin. Intelligence is going down as fewer and fewer books are being read (news flash: the printed book industry is on the way out unless this trend stops), and social organizations like churches and civic clubs see fewer and fewer members attend their meetings.
It takes an especially willful kind of ignorance for a writer whose tool is called Movable Type to forget that press-printed books are perhaps the most transformative technology of the past half-millennium, and certainly one of the most important in the past two thousand years. Here's Kevin Kelly, writing a few months ago for NYT: When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book. Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media.
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