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Human thinking and reasoning gets short-circuited by too much vividness. The difference between those previous eras and now is that our fiction may have become

Human thinking and reasoning gets short-circuited by too much vividness. The difference between those previous eras and now is that our fiction may have become dangerously vivid.

walterbell 11y ago
How will we handle Oculus, Magic Leap, HoloLens, etc?
- noblethrasher 11y ago
  Same way that we handled other new technologies before (e.g. the alphabet, the printing press, perspective art, the Internet, etc.) We’ll stumble along for a few decades making more entertaining toys (along with a few interesting tools) before we end up realizing a new and powerful epistemology that launches us into the next great age civilization. Or, we could end up with Huxely.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
Nonsense. Media vividness isn't a quality of the media -- it's attributed by the viewers. People will perceive the media of their day at the same level of vividness that they would have, in the past, perceived the media of the past. It's self-adjusting.
- noblethrasher 11y ago
  By vividness, I’m talking about the relative powers of various kinds media to impress us; e.g. that television is more vivid than radio, which is more vivid than writing. I wasn’t talking about the impressiveness of special effects specific to visual media. The idea is that since live-action media is more vivid than cartoons and comic books, it might be the case that either it is displacing better media for dealing with complex topics (e.g. books), or monopolizing a particular media that could be put to “better” uses (i.e. more art films and historical dramas)[1]. But, this isn’t a new argument, Neil Postman devoted an entire book to it 30 years ago [2]. Also, the word “nonsense” really wasn’t an appropriate rejoinder because I wasn’t making a deductive argument in the first place. Rather I was suggesting that there might be evidence that using increasingly more vivid media for ever more trivial things is a net harm to society. [1] I say this as someone who is guilty of watching superhero movies almost exclusively (I even paid to see Iron Man 2 in the theater five times). [2] https://www.google.com/?q=amusing%20ourselves%20to%20death#search_plus_one=form https://www.google.com/?q=amusing%20ourselves%20to%20death#s...

Human thinking and reasoning gets short-circuited by too much vividness. The difference between those previous eras and now is that our fiction may have become dangerously vivid.

walterbell 11y ago

How will we handle Oculus, Magic Leap, HoloLens, etc?

noblethrasher 11y ago
Same way that we handled other new technologies before (e.g. the alphabet, the printing press, perspective art, the Internet, etc.) We’ll stumble along for a few decades making more entertaining toys (along with a few interesting tools) before we end up realizing a new and powerful epistemology that launches us into the next great age civilization. Or, we could end up with Huxely.

thaumasiotes 11y ago

Nonsense. Media vividness isn't a quality of the media -- it's attributed by the viewers. People will perceive the media of their day at the same level of vividness that they would have, in the past, perceived the media of the past. It's self-adjusting.

noblethrasher 11y ago
By vividness, I’m talking about the relative powers of various kinds media to impress us; e.g. that television is more vivid than radio, which is more vivid than writing. I wasn’t talking about the impressiveness of special effects specific to visual media. The idea is that since live-action media is more vivid than cartoons and comic books, it might be the case that either it is displacing better media for dealing with complex topics (e.g. books), or monopolizing a particular media that could be put to “better” uses (i.e. more art films and historical dramas)[1]. But, this isn’t a new argument, Neil Postman devoted an entire book to it 30 years ago [2]. Also, the word “nonsense” really wasn’t an appropriate rejoinder because I wasn’t making a deductive argument in the first place. Rather I was suggesting that there might be evidence that using increasingly more vivid media for ever more trivial things is a net harm to society. [1] I say this as someone who is guilty of watching superhero movies almost exclusively (I even paid to see Iron Man 2 in the theater five times). [2] https://www.google.com/?q=amusing%20ourselves%20to%20death#search_plus_one=form https://www.google.com/?q=amusing%20ourselves%20to%20death#s...