• Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    13 days ago

    We absolutely must address how dangerous the internet is to our society. I think we as a species simply can’t handle the destructive potential of the internet (and ditto for News bubbles like Fox).

    Marshall McLuhan argued similarly in the 1960’s about the dangers of rushing forward with mass media, and stipulated that we had yet to understand the cultural impacts of language and writing, let alone (at the time) new media like telephones, radio, and television.

    Traditionally humans have rushed headlong into any and all new communications methods without considering long-term consequences first, and study comes much later, if at all.

    • foggy@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      There are very few more quotable humans to have lived.

      The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

      If that wasn’t the basis for the Black mirror episode, the Waldo moment, I don’t know what was.

      Then we’ve got my personal favorite, which isn’t quite as relevant here:

      Anybody who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.

      Was also famous for saying

      We drive forward using only our rear view mirrors

      And perhaps his most quoted quip

      The medium is the message

      Which I don’t think was clear to people what he meant until, probably, the advent of the personal web page. Guy died before the world wide web and basically saw that tik tok would be our undoing.