When Everybody Watched Leave it to Beaver
If Ken Burns lives long enough, he should be able to do a documentary on what life was like before cable TV and the Internet. Meanwhile, here’s what he thinks:
Burns says the proliferation of cheap production and distribution technologies for creative expression is a cause for optimisim but worries about audience fragmentation. “When I grew up, there were four or five channels and people basically shared a common canon of knowledge….Now people can seek their own self-satisfying sources of knowledge [which] is hugely dangerous.”
As a famous news anchor used to say, “And that’s the way it is…”
And what about before TV. When there weren’t four or five channels indoctrinating the masses. Before newspapers were readily available. Was that also hugely dangerous? However did we survive all that independant thinking.
He’s writing about a period of time that spanned one generation–his. Extrapolations are a bit dangerous.
kdk33 Says:
October 4th, 2011 at 8:11 am
<i>And what about before TV. When there weren’t four or five channels indoctrinating the masses. Before newspapers were readily available….However did we survive all that independent thinking..</i>
The British Empire didn’t survive that ‘independent thinking’.
In colonial times we had what were called pamphleteer’s. They brought us such dangerous notions as the ‘American Revolution’.
At the moment it’s a really dangerous period in history when even the worlds most brutal dictators can’t control the flow of information in their own countries. Revolutions could happen.
Speaking of card-carrying communists…
Yes, more information freely available is very dangerous….to those who wish to control information to suit their agenda.
Care to point your social scientists at whether liberals or conservatives wish to control information more and what that means Keith?
The fear that the lowly “common man” is incapable of separating information from disinformation and needs to have it done for him by self appointed experts is a common thread of the liberal mind. You can just feel the sneers of our betters scowling upon us as we attempt the futile effort to think for ourselves.
And unsurprisingly the selected experts can only be of like minded group think. Descent is eliminated by consensus vote. Intellectual democracy…how beautiful a concept…for thought control.
Information anarchy, let the market sort it out.
As with all things, neither extreme is very workable, but a hybrid will work best.