In years before the Internet, we were always limited by our medium. Books could only hold so many words, cassette tapes could only have a few hours of audio if we were lucky, and VHS's typically only had one movie on them with little or no bonus features. (In the cases of large movies like Titanic, you had two tapes.)
This is becoming less and less so with the fantastic electronic media that we have today. Sure we're still limited to our hard drives and servers as far as our movie and music collection, but as far as text is involved, we have virtually unlimited space to work with.
Despite this, it seems that many of the users on the Internet aren't taking advantage of the great power that we have. Of course, there are problems with the sites themselves, (YouTube and Twitter limiting the number of characters on comments and posts respectively) but the real problem seems to lie in the fact that we popularized the Internet while the television was the largest medium of mass communication at the time. Short news bits are what we are used to, and we perceive that we have little time to read.
In case you didn't know, TLDR stands for "Too Long, Didn't Read."
I feel strange talking about my generation as if I am an outsider, but in many ways I feel so different from the majority of the 18-25 demographic. I'm not hooked on reality television or pop music. I prefer my media with a little meat and substance. Of course, this doesn't mean I don't like browsing through LOLcats or memes every once in a while, but I don't spend an hour looking at them on TV or listening to remixes of "Do a Barrel Roll" like it's art.
I guess I'm just disappointed at the fact that we have so much potential to change our world with the internet, but we're still caught up in our inability to process anything longer than a full page of single-spaced text before feeling fatigued enough to say, "tl;dr."
I guess I'm just disappointed at the fact that we have so much potential to change our world with the internet, but we're still caught up in our inability to process anything longer than a full page of single-spaced text before feeling fatigued enough to say, "tl;dr."
This is the kind of thing Postman was talking about with "amusing ourselves to death." It's something we discussed more at length in my TCOM classes as we discussed emerging technology, and what is considered necessary and unnecessary. I'd also like to think of myself as not one of my generation, but when I take a look at my literacy journal, the amount of times I got on Facebook is astronomical. Pretty soon, this sort of amusement will be a type of conditioning kids will not be able to escape.
ReplyDeleteWhile this is definitely true, I think it should also be noted that no matter what advances we make, there are always going to be stupid people who abuse technology. It was the same for the printing press, sure we printed lots of good books, but we have a lot of shitty books (i.e. fluffy cheesy romance novels that are there for pure entertainment) floating around as well. I don't think it's fair to say that we are all just as stupid as the people you pointed out in that post, it just happens to be what draws attention when critics are trying to point out how dumb our society has gotten. We've always had dumb people and we always will. We just have to focus on society as an aggregate.
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