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I'm reminded of the argument in 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' that the predominant medium shapes the culture. It presents the argument as a juxtaposition between

by Cpoll 10y ago

I'm reminded of the argument in 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' that the predominant medium shapes the culture. It presents the argument as a juxtaposition between a pre-telegraph textual culture and a modern-day visual one: The textual culture encourages slow reasoning, contemplation and logic, the visual culture encourages sound bytes and de-emphasizes contemplation and reasoning; a TV show simply won't give you enough time for thought before it moves to the next idea. I think the point I'm trying to make is that all media has a "selection algorithm" that distorts reality - TV and the news are great examples of this.

lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
I hear that line of reasoning frequently and Im not sure it has a leg to stand on. Telegrams by their nature are going to be terse and infrequent certainly not a ponderous essay you can mull over. And are we seriously arguing that in the, comparatively, "larger" world of the early 20th century where many communities could be completely isolated from differing ideas there was some how greater access to a wider variety of information? My personal hypothesis (although Im not as familiar with more rigorous investigation into the subject) is reactionary culture in the "first world" is less to do with content accessibility and more to do with availability of time as compared to the signal to noise ratio of our information sources. It's not that people are becoming less informed than the past, just that we have many more tools at our disposal to find conflicting information. It's certainly a dangerous thing to put on the rose colored glasses and look to the past.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Telegrams by their nature are going to be terse and infrequent certainly not a ponderous essay you can mull over. Which is beside the point, since the parent talks of a pre-telegraph terse text culture, not a telegraph one. >And are we seriously arguing that in the, comparatively, "larger" world of the early 20th century where many communities could be completely isolated from differing ideas there was some how greater access to a wider variety of information? No, the idea is that there was deeper involvement into the available information -- instead of always skimming it, which ends up not delving enough into anything. >It's certainly a dangerous thing to put on the rose colored glasses and look to the past. It's even more dangerous to think of history as a kind of monotonic progress across all sectors (as opposed to just the technological one).
digi_owl 10y ago
It may have held true when you would read perhaps one newspaper or two a day. But these days, not a chance. As a personal anecdote i keep finding myself skipping down long texts because so much of it seems to ruminate on the same info.
yk 10y ago
There was a pretty good essay in the German computer magazine c't sometime in the early 2000nds, were the author argued that a computer is a meta-medium, that is a computer can emulate almost arbitrary types of media. A computer can work as a TV or as a game console or as a textual medium. From this point of view, it is no longer the case that there is an inherent selection algorithm that is generated by what works well in the medium, for example a game show just would not work as a news paper article, but that one can decide which advantages and disadvantages a computer has. And so it is more or less the first time, that one can decide which selection algorithm is the relevant one.

by Cpoll 10y ago

lordCarbonFiber 10y ago

I hear that line of reasoning frequently and Im not sure it has a leg to stand on. Telegrams by their nature are going to be terse and infrequent certainly not a ponderous essay you can mull over. And are we seriously arguing that in the, comparatively, "larger" world of the early 20th century where many communities could be completely isolated from differing ideas there was some how greater access to a wider variety of information? My personal hypothesis (although Im not as familiar with more rigorous investigation into the subject) is reactionary culture in the "first world" is less to do with content accessibility and more to do with availability of time as compared to the signal to noise ratio of our information sources. It's not that people are becoming less informed than the past, just that we have many more tools at our disposal to find conflicting information. It's certainly a dangerous thing to put on the rose colored glasses and look to the past.

coldtea 10y ago
>Telegrams by their nature are going to be terse and infrequent certainly not a ponderous essay you can mull over. Which is beside the point, since the parent talks of a pre-telegraph terse text culture, not a telegraph one. >And are we seriously arguing that in the, comparatively, "larger" world of the early 20th century where many communities could be completely isolated from differing ideas there was some how greater access to a wider variety of information? No, the idea is that there was deeper involvement into the available information -- instead of always skimming it, which ends up not delving enough into anything. >It's certainly a dangerous thing to put on the rose colored glasses and look to the past. It's even more dangerous to think of history as a kind of monotonic progress across all sectors (as opposed to just the technological one).

digi_owl 10y ago

It may have held true when you would read perhaps one newspaper or two a day. But these days, not a chance. As a personal anecdote i keep finding myself skipping down long texts because so much of it seems to ruminate on the same info.

yk 10y ago

There was a pretty good essay in the German computer magazine c't sometime in the early 2000nds, were the author argued that a computer is a meta-medium, that is a computer can emulate almost arbitrary types of media. A computer can work as a TV or as a game console or as a textual medium. From this point of view, it is no longer the case that there is an inherent selection algorithm that is generated by what works well in the medium, for example a game show just would not work as a news paper article, but that one can decide which advantages and disadvantages a computer has. And so it is more or less the first time, that one can decide which selection algorithm is the relevant one.