After
going through Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, I've come to understand his plight with the way media has
integrated itself into our culture. As I was reading, what stood out most to me
was how a medium, the way we conduct human discourse, can have such a drastic
effect on the way we conduct our lives.
Whether it be how we communicate, how we perceive concepts, or educate
our younger generations, I've come to understand that we must be cautiously
aware of our media, especially when it has the ability to affect so many facets of our lives. When thinking about the
media that serves as the medium contemporary to our time, it becomes rather
obvious that the internet has had an even more drastic effect on our lives than
the television has, and unarguably has become our next outlet of discourse. Keeping Postman's
warning from the last chapter in mind, have we been following that same path to
mirroring the World State, or have we diverged from that, becoming more aware
of the media that can effectively determine almost every aspect of our culture?
Are we still stuck in the Age of Entertainment?
In my opinion, I've found that the internet has become both a tool and a
medium in our hands compared to the television, as with the internet we have
the chance to participate in human discourse, more so than during the Age of
Entertainment; however, as with every tool, we must take care with how we use
it, so that we can better define its purpose (and in the internet's case, it's
purpose as a medium as well).
I agree with you that the television and internet have both become dominant in our society. People don't know how to live without this technology and many aren't willing to sacrifice their usage of it. If people become more aware of their habits of using technology, then we will be able to better define its purpose like you suggest.
ReplyDeleteWith the subject of the internet at hand, I feel as though people might be too worried of what might happen if it is "abused." Sure, with what the article said about how we now have lower attention spans because we require more stimulation than we ever did before. But is that really a bad thing? It might mean that we are more sophisticated than we were in the past, and that simple things don't peek to our interests anymore. How we are towards books today compared to how it was in the past might seem like a negative effect of the internet, but the fact that constant streams of information come to us makes up for it. If we want to know something, we could always look it up on the internet and get our answers. Because of that, I think that the people of today are more educated than ever before. That's just my opinion though.
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