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Penforhire · 03-30-2011, 01:49 PM

Banal might be the wrong word but I'm not expecting a cutural golden age. I know many people predicted the decline of civilization since, well, forever. I'm recalling Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" from the late 80's.

Now I'm going to ramble, lol.

The internet and TV drive the masses toward homogenizing and lowest-common-denominator. Sure, there are bastions of intellectualism, say MobileRead for example. But we do not dominate society. American Idol, Survivor, and assorted other pseudo-reality TV shows dominate. Sites like YouTube, Netflix, Google, and Twitter dominate the internet. So I suppose I am agreeing with Spellbanisher's excerpt in that I see that sort of content as infantile and passive.

It represents a loss of culture, IMO.

There are a couple of advantages and maybe they will be enough to outweigh the loss of traditions. Aside from photo/video content nobody knows your race, sex, age, religion or other biasing characteristics on the internet. Maybe your language will give it away but you're just as likely to fake out your readers (e.g. cops who pretend to be 13 year olds trolling for pedophiles). Another advantage is ease of access. In a revolution similar to Gutenberg's printing press, anyone with an internet connection has access to more free information than they could possibly absorb in a lifetime. Education should become less elitist, despite the currently-higher-price of on-line education such as University of Phoenix or Capella. Another advantage is telepresence, the ability to interact with people around the globe with only time zones (sleep) as a barrier.

Those are significant advantages. Will it be enough to avoid a banal near future? Dunno. Maybe. I am mourning the loss of traditional written epics, something I studied in college. It takes a cultural basis to put an epic into context. The closest I sense we come to that these days is in the cyberpunk genre, such as William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, or Charlie Stross. They write about post-cultural worlds that may come to pass.

03-30-2011, 01:49 PM	#27
Penforhire Wizard Posts: 2,230 Karma: 7145404 Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Southern California Device: Kindle Voyage & iPhone 7+	Banal might be the wrong word but I'm not expecting a cutural golden age. I know many people predicted the decline of civilization since, well, forever. I'm recalling Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" from the late 80's. Now I'm going to ramble, lol. The internet and TV drive the masses toward homogenizing and lowest-common-denominator. Sure, there are bastions of intellectualism, say MobileRead for example. But we do not dominate society. American Idol, Survivor, and assorted other pseudo-reality TV shows dominate. Sites like YouTube, Netflix, Google, and Twitter dominate the internet. So I suppose I am agreeing with Spellbanisher's excerpt in that I see that sort of content as infantile and passive. It represents a loss of culture, IMO. There are a couple of advantages and maybe they will be enough to outweigh the loss of traditions. Aside from photo/video content nobody knows your race, sex, age, religion or other biasing characteristics on the internet. Maybe your language will give it away but you're just as likely to fake out your readers (e.g. cops who pretend to be 13 year olds trolling for pedophiles). Another advantage is ease of access. In a revolution similar to Gutenberg's printing press, anyone with an internet connection has access to more free information than they could possibly absorb in a lifetime. Education should become less elitist, despite the currently-higher-price of on-line education such as University of Phoenix or Capella. Another advantage is telepresence, the ability to interact with people around the globe with only time zones (sleep) as a barrier. Those are significant advantages. Will it be enough to avoid a banal near future? Dunno. Maybe. I am mourning the loss of traditional written epics, something I studied in college. It takes a cultural basis to put an epic into context. The closest I sense we come to that these days is in the cyberpunk genre, such as William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, or Charlie Stross. They write about post-cultural worlds that may come to pass.