Mindful, Critical Consumption of Media is Paramount

The problern.. in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch. The solution must be found in how we watch. For I believe it may fairly be said that we have yet to learn what television is. And the reason is that -there has been no worthwhile discussion, let alone widespread public understanding, of what information is and how it gives direction to a culture. There is a certain poignancy in this, since there are no people who more frequently and enthusiastic...

 Technology is Ideology

...what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kamp for Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that tech...

 The Flood of Trivial Information is More Deleterious Than...

...in the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were. For example, I would venture the opinion that the traditional civil libertarian opposition to ...

 Context-Free Information is Unactionable

Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now sometimes called a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us,...

 Huxley and Orwell's Portrayed Very Different Dystopias

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What ...

 Criticism of "The dawn of post-literate society"

I enjoy reading as much as anyone, but I find these kinds of posts to be very short-sighted. First off, civilization precedes mass reading by millennia. To attribute the Enlightenment and modern industrial civilization to reading, and any counter-movement against the Enlightenment as anti-reading, is to fundamentally misunderstand most of history. E.g., Romanticism was an explicitly anti-Enlightenment movement and arguably had more interest in poetry and literature than the forces it was rea...

 The Culture that Create Abundance has Difficulty Enjoying It

All were expressing a leisure ethic: a worldview in which a preference for free time and intrinsically motivated pursuits is accompanied by an understanding of how time can best be spent. To most people today, the notion of a leisure ethic will sound foreign, paradoxical, and indeed subversive, even though leisure is still commonly associated with the good life. More than any other society in the past, ours certainly has the technology and the wealth to furnish more people with greater freedo...

 From Disciplinary to Achievement Society

Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft ]. Also, its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement- subjects.”...

 Jone's Dilemma

1-48. This principle is named after Reginald Victor Jones, a British professor heavily involved in solving science and technology intelligence challenges. In this deception, the target receives information through multiple means and methods, from many angles, throughout an operational environment. Deception generally becomes more difficult as the number of conduits available to the deception target to confirm the real situation increases. However, the greater the number of conduits that are d...

 Increasing the Number of Researchers to Perpetuate Techno...

Over the past century, we’ve seen relatively steady, though slowing, technological progress. Sustaining this progress is the result of a balancing act: every year, further progress gets harder, but every year we exponentially increase the number of researchers and engineers. For instance, in the United States, research effort is over twenty times higher today than in the 1930s.27 The number of scientists in the world is doubling every couple of decades, such that at least three-quarters of ...