"Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented."
This according to Neal Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, in his chapter on Media as Epistemology. What a cool title for a chapter. "We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough" This according to Thoreau in Walden. And what cranky Hank would say about J. Timberlake and friends is easy to imagine. "I raise no objection to television's junk. The best things on TV are it's junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is what intellectual and critics are constantly urging television to do. The trouble with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough. For, like the printing press, television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric. To talk seriously about television, one must therefore talk of epistemology. All other commentary is in itself trivial" Yeah, now I remember why I stopped reading this guy years ago. He was saying the exact same thing as Jacques Ellul, except in English. American English as opposed to English Translated from the Philosophical French. I got so excited I went back and read more Ellul. I get a universal reaction I when I talk about the fact that I don't have a tv, or it comes up - which it does all the time since the main topic of conversation anymore isn't the weather. "hey, didya see xxxxx on tv last night?" The reaction I get when I say "Nah, I don't have a tv" is first shocked amazement, and then agreement along the lines of "I don't watch it much myself. I just like the history channel." And somehow, this freaks me out more than if everybody just stuck with porn, jerry springer and cop car chase crashes. Because lets face it, even if the shows that unlock the secrets of the cosmos and history were absolutely real, the artifice of method transfers that reality into something different than reality. A virtual manipuable reality, yeah that could be bad. But what's worse is the degrading of humanity into programmable robots. It takes a careful reading and interpretation to decode what is in the word. It is work. Staring at a flickering tv screen burns less calories than sleep or staring at a blank wall. It's easier, it's more efficient, but it destroys intellect. Sometimes pragmatism isn't so much fun. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
