After finishing Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman has got me thinking about if it is worth it to lose our collective society's mind as a whole in exchange for endless entertainment. It is like the situation of whether choosing to be happy without knowing anything, or to know everything and not be happy about it, although in this case it is more similar to the first scenario I've mentioned. A society in which one "does not know what what they are laughing about and why they have stopped thinking,"(163) as people are slowly taught to believe that everything is supposed to be entertaining and not be analyzed, explained, or expanded upon. There are no arguments, no counter-arguments, no fluidity and necessity in perplexity whatsoever, and that scares me.
With the mention of how computers can contribute to this problem, I want to bring everyone to the existence of smartphones. Smartphones are like pocket computers, giving us access to many sources of information and entertainment, such as the internet. So the question is, does the new technology available to us contribute to the problem of a Huxleyan society, or can it be a solution? With the invention of the smartphone, we can choose to view whatever we like, and boundless amounts of information are available to us to use. This can be useful in informating people about the dangers around them and prevent them from being at risk of those dangers. However, in this case, our phones are doing nothing but contributing to the problem. The reason why teens are on their phones most of the time in the first place is because it is entertaining to us. Taking an iPhone as an example, the news recommended are exactly like the type that Postman warned us about, sensational stories that appeal to a person's emotions and serve no purpose in that person's daily life. Then, we have Youtube, which is like the internet's TV, showering us with many videos serving to entertain us with ads that appeal to our desires. Albeit that is partially our own fault as we only watch the videos that entertain us, driving the other ones out of business.
Is a future in which a mindless society that only seeks for entertaiment inevitable? Can we really escape the clutches of television? For now, we can only wait and see for what will happen.
Linh Nguyen
Yes, entertainment is a big part of our lives, but I do not think that it will become the be all, end all of our society. People are creative and ambitious beings who enjoy creating and being part of something, so people will always be doing something more than taking part in entertainment. People will be solving complex problems and creating beautiful works of art because that is what people have always done, and it is what they always will do.
ReplyDeleteThis would be like going back in time. Thousands of years ago, people were happy even though they did not know much about technology or science. The people were not ignorant by choice but by lack of information. If the metaphoric medium excludes other content, then there will be things we will miss out on without actually knowing. In the future, we might not know about a lot of things, but we will still be happy. It probably won't be our choice to be ignorant, however, it will only be the flow of too much information.
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