Brooke Gladstone poses the question "How can we ensure that our development as moral and social animals keeps pace with our rapidly evolving communication technology?"
She suggests an answer to the question immediately by saying we have to play "an active role in our media consumption," and i totally agree with her. An older man asked me the other day if i read. And i said to him that i usually dont have time to read. And he responded with some philosophical quote about people who dont have time to read are.... well i dont remember what he said but he basically said that we are screwing ourselves if we dont read books. Just because i dont read books does not mean that i am not active in reading and informing myself and keeping up with ideas that people are writing down. I just get all of this information on the internet now through different apllications like stumble upon. I skim through stumble upon just about everday, and there i can learn about new things happening all over the world. so now who is more educated, the old man who can read through one book in a week and says he is now that much wiser on the certain subject of that book, or the young man who can get online and find the information on not only the book, but responses to what people around the world thought about that book.
But this is where the active role in media comes into play. The young man who gets online and finds the information on the book is in a dilemna. The problem with our society these days is that a lot of people arent looking and searching the right kind of information. The web is so full of social distractions and entertainment that nobody takes the responsibility to look up hard hitting news, and to say that someone is playing an active role in that media and is researching online to seek the truth is almost unheard of now. But luckily there are some professionals and other people that are willing to sift through the bullshit and make it aware to the public. I'll use the recent SOPA and PIPA legislation as an example. I would not have known anything about SOPA or PIPA if it wasnt for my facebook page, where i saw that some respected friends of mine post how much bullshit those pieces of legislation are. From that i researched it a little more and was able to form an opinion of it. From then i posted it to my facebook and asked everyone to read it and become aware of it.
The social media and the communication tools that we are using online mostly is becoming a huge tool that is leading to larger and richer webs of interdependence around the world. If it wasnt for this online communcation tool (Facebook) that i used, i would not have known about this web of interdependence that was going on in my own country which was a group of individuals who were standing up for the rights that our constitution guarantees and that our lawmakers were trying to take away. The recent Egyptian Government overthrow is a great example of how we as people of the earth are ensuring that our development as moral and social animals is keeping pace with our rapidly evolving communication technology. Thanks to the online communication tools a majority of the country of Egypt, along with other people around the world, became aware and fed up with the government in Egypt. The people of Egypt organized themselves in a large, rich web of interdependence and overthrew their freaking president!
I think our development as social and moral animals is evolving because of the rapidly evolving communication tools in the direction of the events that took place via Egypt and with the online Blackout protesting the SOPA and PIPA act. We as American citizens are realizing the power of these communication tools and are realizing how a kid way up in bum fuck Alaska can be interconnected and apart of a nationwide protest of certain federal legislation. It would tickle me pink to see someone like the ACLU or something similar to that start making some noise via online communication tools about how we as american citizens can become aware and stand up for, unite, and protest some of the rights that our government has taken away and continues to take away from us right under our noses because people these days are busy looking up and searching for KONY 2012 videos or something like that. So maybe this rich web of interdependence has gone so far as to connect everybody around the entire world, that people in America are more worried about becoming globally educated because they can, and they forget to educate themselves and keep track of whats going on in their own country.
Thanks for making me think over this semester Erik. I am not only appalled at what is happening with the world as far as communication technology, but i am also enraged, disgusted, happy, sad, and all the above about how the majority of people use it, and what they pay attention to.
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