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Future shock: A big book that was wrong
- PaulHoule 3y agoMcLuhan said television was a “cool medium” in that it calmed people’s passions. (Think of how a broadcast can be viewed by 10 million people and there is no 1-in-a-million lunatic who tries to firebomb the TV station) He thought that this was because of its low fidelity and might have thought HDTV with surround sound would be different. Baudrillard saw “high definition” as something that would intensify the simulation/seduction aspect and part of a “cooling” strategy in society that neutralizes dissent. I would tend to dismiss “alternative lifestyles”, “protest movements” and such insofar as these are an extension of individualism which is the dominant ideology of the U.S. (Lasch said that his “Culture of Narcissism” wasn’t really about the 1970s but rather the period 1870- in the US and is widely thought in Japan to describe the Tokugawa period)