The original: I railed about the use of disconnected headlines on emails from as intellectual a publication as Smithsonian Magazine, and linked it to Neil Postman’s analysis of the values of the TV age.
The follow-up: Wired Magazine wrote about the decline of the internet and Wikipedia as it morphs into a graphics- and not text-based medium. They also cite Postman.
Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television’s values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals — ‘like’ buttons — over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciously performing.
James Russell (whom you should meet, Isabel, especially since he lives in Ottawa) sends me a posting suggesting that giraffes will do better than humans in the near future. Giraffes still look after themselves; most humans will be rendered utterly redundant by artificial intelligence. CEOs, doctors, lawyers, will be just as vulnerable as ditch-diggers and auto-assembly-line workers.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/you-will-lose-your-job-to-a-robot-and-sooner-than-you-think/
If Google already knows what you want, what you’re interested in, why bother typing in a question? Why not just let Google (or its descendants) seem feed a constant blah of information into our echo chambers?
Except that if we become truly redundant, why would we even care?
That’s my depressing thought for the day…..
Jim T
Jim T – Yikes. Maybe I don’t want to follow that link . . . I can depress myself without any outside help!