Impressive and yet again I would ask what does the quantity of things mean, when it is quality being what is actually more meaningful? As for instance has having five times the words had any as being more able to communicate humanity’s hopes and fears better than Shakespeare, or many times the graduate students expedited the discovery of the TOE, hastened finding the cure for all cancers or eliminated hunger and want from the face of the planet?
The truth being the more information that becomes available, the less there seem to be who wish to increase their understanding, as facts are not being knowledge, yet only the underlying reasons for them. The sorry thing being this was all foreseen years ago by a person of quality having understanding, whose words still fall on deaf ears for most as if they had never existed.
“They don't give us information, they give us facts, factoids. You don't learn who Napoleon was and how he was motivated. You learn what year he was born, and when he died. That's useless."
Holy mackeral, Phil, you mean to tell me ray Bradbury is still alive?! He's ninety now, wow! Good for him. I just added him at #80 to my People who Aren't Dead Yet page, thanks.
Yeah, I remember watching Oskar Werner playing Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 on television when I was a kid. Since I was a bookworm, I ranked that film up there with the greatest of horror films. It's still chilling, just the thought of burning a book. Oo-oo-oo.
(However, if special dispensation were given to burn only 2 books, I'd nominate Mein Kampf and The Tao of Physics.)
"The Veldt" affected me deeply as well, I'd forgotten about that, so thanks.
Good interview with Bradbury you linked to. Well, he got one thing wrong, but he spoke of it in 2000, a mere five years after half of all American homes became wired (to AOL) to the internet. Remember dial-up connections? :-)
"This [Internet] thing is bound to fail. Napster's out there, stealing everyone blind. They're stealing people's work. They should be put in jail, all of them."
"All this electronic stuff is remote, removed from you. The Internet is just a big scam the computer companies cooked up to make you get a computer into every home." ... Ray Bradbury
Yeah well, the Internet is stronger than ever if anything. Businesses can't compete without being wired in, and the internet is truly a paradigm shift of the greatest proportions, right up there with electric lighting, the automobile, and the telephone.
It's a double-edged sword. Quite the adventure, let's see where it goes. (what choice do we have?)
Yes it’s true that the proliferation of computers and with it the expanded capabilities of electronic communication is a two edged sword as it is with any technological advance. The thing being the lessons taught by a famous Canadian such as the “media is the message” and the implications of “The Global Village” still are not fully understood as to be appreciated today by many. This is what Bradbury would serve to warn us about being legitimate concerns, with his only flaw being he foresaw only the negative component(s) of it. The truth is things all come down to their potential(s), only in this case we are the ones to choose which aspects of such potential(s) are to be important ones becoming the dominant ones and thus how can one not empathize with Bradbury when the masses for millennia have repeatedly made the wrong choices in such regard.
Oh as for remembering dial up connections, I was linking to other’s computers (bulletin boards) back in the mid eighties via modem’s whose speed had me able to read the test faster then it could appear. I became a CompuServe member in 1989 having access to the internet before the WEB was born. I actually have copy of Netscape navigator I bought dated 1995. I connected to high speed cable service as soon as it became available in 1996. So in such respect I am one of the pioneers who helped blaze the trails others now use regularly and yet for me it was always in the spirit of what I could learn and those others I could come to know during the journey.
The truth being, the masses were not interested in such things then and the vast majority still aren’t today. I am often reminded that McLuhan classified the light bulb as being a media, as although it didn’t supply us with information it provides a space in the darkness to give us an environment which never existed before. That is to say it’s up to each of us as to what to do with such spaces and I would contend for the best part still most of it is wasted.
Best,
Phil
”The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
-Marshall McLuhan
”The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.” .
-Marshall McLuhan
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist. .
-Marshall McLuhan
”All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” .
Hi Phil, thanks for reminding me of Marshall McLuhan. Remember his cameo in "Annie Hall"? Still funny. :-)
Yeah well, we're older but not old yet*, nevertheless I can relate to younger folks today not appreciating how far we've come in so short a period of time. My first introduction to computers was in the fall of 1974 when I was a college freshman in my college's Aerospace Engineering department, and to "run a program" you had to use a specialized IBM machine with punch cards (one program line per card), then hand the "batch" to a grad student behind a counter who would put it into a queue and then an IBM mainframe and half an hour later you'd get your "printout". Whoa to us if we typed a comma where a period was needed, if so we'd have to repeat the process. Let the debuggery begin!
But sure the Information Revolution is more like the Information Overload Revolution, which doesn't bother me personally as I'm part masochist which I can prove because I'm trying to learn all that I can, but I have noted this does turn people off with a correlation often related to the degree of gray hair, or the absence of hair in general. :-p
The closest analogy the current situation in History has IMO was in the teens and 1920's, when "the horseless carriage" began to replace the horse as the common mode of transportation. Livery stables were everywhere, and the folks running them had no idea the auto would replace them. "Get a horse!" they'd say, laughing, when they came alongside a broken-down car on the road. Yeah, but Henry Ford had the last laugh, didn't he?
Can't stop progress, right, Phil? Might as well embrace it.
* = Btw I turn 54 this month. Now I can't say I'm in my "young 50's" anymore, as I have achieved "mid-50's" status, at least until I'm 57! Yeesh, where did the time go? I'm still young at heart though, which is what really counts, right?
4 comments:
Hi Steven,
Impressive and yet again I would ask what does the quantity of things mean, when it is quality being what is actually more meaningful? As for instance has having five times the words had any as being more able to communicate humanity’s hopes and fears better than Shakespeare, or many times the graduate students expedited the discovery of the TOE, hastened finding the cure for all cancers or eliminated hunger and want from the face of the planet?
The truth being the more information that becomes available, the less there seem to be who wish to increase their understanding, as facts are not being knowledge, yet only the underlying reasons for them. The sorry thing being this was all foreseen years ago by a person of quality having understanding, whose words still fall on deaf ears for most as if they had never existed.
“They don't give us information, they give us facts, factoids. You don't learn who Napoleon was and how he was motivated. You learn what year he was born, and when he died. That's useless."
-Ray Bradbury
Best,
Phil
Holy mackeral, Phil, you mean to tell me ray Bradbury is still alive?! He's ninety now, wow! Good for him. I just added him at #80 to my People who Aren't Dead Yet page, thanks.
Yeah, I remember watching Oskar Werner playing Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 on television when I was a kid. Since I was a bookworm, I ranked that film up there with the greatest of horror films. It's still chilling, just the thought of burning a book. Oo-oo-oo.
(However, if special dispensation were given to burn only 2 books, I'd nominate Mein Kampf and The Tao of Physics.)
"The Veldt" affected me deeply as well, I'd forgotten about that, so thanks.
Good interview with Bradbury you linked to. Well, he got one thing wrong, but he spoke of it in 2000, a mere five years after half of all American homes became wired (to AOL) to the internet. Remember dial-up connections? :-)
"This [Internet] thing is bound to fail. Napster's out there, stealing everyone blind. They're stealing people's work. They should be put in jail, all of them."
"All this electronic stuff is remote, removed from you. The Internet is just a big scam the computer companies cooked up to make you get a computer into every home." ... Ray Bradbury
Yeah well, the Internet is stronger than ever if anything. Businesses can't compete without being wired in, and the internet is truly a paradigm shift of the greatest proportions, right up there with electric lighting, the automobile, and the telephone.
It's a double-edged sword. Quite the adventure, let's see where it goes. (what choice do we have?)
Hi Steven,
Yes it’s true that the proliferation of computers and with it the expanded capabilities of electronic communication is a two edged sword as it is with any technological advance. The thing being the lessons taught by a famous Canadian such as the “media is the message” and the implications of “The Global Village” still are not fully understood as to be appreciated today by many. This is what Bradbury would serve to warn us about being legitimate concerns, with his only flaw being he foresaw only the negative component(s) of it. The truth is things all come down to their potential(s), only in this case we are the ones to choose which aspects of such potential(s) are to be important ones becoming the dominant ones and thus how can one not empathize with Bradbury when the masses for millennia have repeatedly made the wrong choices in such regard.
Oh as for remembering dial up connections, I was linking to other’s computers (bulletin boards) back in the mid eighties via modem’s whose speed had me able to read the test faster then it could appear. I became a CompuServe member in 1989 having access to the internet before the WEB was born. I actually have copy of Netscape navigator I bought dated 1995. I connected to high speed cable service as soon as it became available in 1996. So in such respect I am one of the pioneers who helped blaze the trails others now use regularly and yet for me it was always in the spirit of what I could learn and those others I could come to know during the journey.
The truth being, the masses were not interested in such things then and the vast majority still aren’t today. I am often reminded that McLuhan classified the light bulb as being a media, as although it didn’t supply us with information it provides a space in the darkness to give us an environment which never existed before. That is to say it’s up to each of us as to what to do with such spaces and I would contend for the best part still most of it is wasted.
Best,
Phil
”The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
-Marshall McLuhan
”The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.” .
-Marshall McLuhan
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist. .
-Marshall McLuhan
”All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” .
-Marshall McLuhan
Best,
Phil
Hi Phil, thanks for reminding me of Marshall McLuhan. Remember his cameo in "Annie Hall"? Still funny. :-)
Yeah well, we're older but not old yet*, nevertheless I can relate to younger folks today not appreciating how far we've come in so short a period of time. My first introduction to computers was in the fall of 1974 when I was a college freshman in my college's Aerospace Engineering department, and to "run a program" you had to use a specialized IBM machine with punch cards (one program line per card), then hand the "batch" to a grad student behind a counter who would put it into a queue and then an IBM mainframe and half an hour later you'd get your "printout". Whoa to us if we typed a comma where a period was needed, if so we'd have to repeat the process. Let the debuggery begin!
But sure the Information Revolution is more like the Information Overload Revolution, which doesn't bother me personally as I'm part masochist which I can prove because I'm trying to learn all that I can, but I have noted this does turn people off with a correlation often related to the degree of gray hair, or the absence of hair in general. :-p
The closest analogy the current situation in History has IMO was in the teens and 1920's, when "the horseless carriage" began to replace the horse as the common mode of transportation. Livery stables were everywhere, and the folks running them had no idea the auto would replace them. "Get a horse!" they'd say, laughing, when they came alongside a broken-down car on the road. Yeah, but Henry Ford had the last laugh, didn't he?
Can't stop progress, right, Phil? Might as well embrace it.
* = Btw I turn 54 this month. Now I can't say I'm in my "young 50's" anymore, as I have achieved "mid-50's" status, at least until I'm 57! Yeesh, where did the time go? I'm still young at heart though, which is what really counts, right?
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