This readin' and writin' business is turning us into helpless idiots.

I mean what will become of our natural memory if all we have to do is write stuff down and read it later on. When I was kid you memorized what was important. And we were _strong_!!!

Then there's the effect on personal communication. What ever became of traveling days and weeks to go talk to someone else far away. We miss all that travel and and seeing what the world is like. (Not to mention the effect on the travel industry.) A written letter just doesn't have the same effect on someone as a face to face visit. And besides, if its in writing, how am I gonna wiggle out of terms and conditions I don't like?

I tell you, I don't like it.

And don't get me started on that damn printin' press...

edit:

Seriously (huuuur hur hur hur) people aren't getting stupider.

There've _always_ been stupid people in great numbers. Never been a shortage. Its just that its easier to see them or have to deal with them. Anyone can post a blog or get hits on youtube. That's a good thing. The problem isn't too much information technology, its too little filter and editorial technology. It'll happen. We're, what, 15, 20 years into this internet thingie. 40 years if you're generous. It took over a hundred years for the printing press to stabilize technologically and several hundred years for people to learn to deal with its societal implications (actually we're still working on that one...) Sites like this (hacker news) are just the beginning.

In the meantime, I've started doing a little grassroots filtering by no longer reading Newsweek technology articles...

My take is that there were a lot of tasks that were clearly delineated in the past: watching TV, reading news, paying bills, balancing the checkbook, playing games, catching up with friends -- no-one could see you doing one and confuse it for something else.

Now, we do all these things through a couple devices. I don't buy the idea that we're really doing that much different. It's just really hard to tell tasks apart; all we see is "guy staring at screen".

But that guy staring at that screen? He could be checking a Twitter stream, or he could be reading a letter from his mother. He could be watching porn, or he could be studying for an exam. He could be playing Peggle, or he could be looking at photos of his new niece.

The only thing I know for sure, is that it's wildly presumptuous to think I actually know what he's doing, just because it involves a screen.

Recent technologies have allowed us to do almost everything using a screen. Unfortunately, all that extra screen time often takes a heavy toll in ways people are loathe to admit.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10446874-71.html http://www.healthfinder.gov/News/newsstory.aspx?docid=636475

"Beck and Palin are the inevitable outcome of that devolution. They are what we deserve. They are, in fact, what we've created."

Right. Would Fr. Coughlin have got where he did without the Internet deluge? Or William Jennings Bryan or William Duane? What half-ass posturing. Demagoguery does not and never has depended on the existence of a technology, though various technologies have given and advantage to one or another style of demagoguery.

Newsweek should know better than to publish this--or perhaps print has rotted their wits.

Or it could be that he just does not see how these new devices, which are today geared only to entertainment, could some day be used to further empower us. Perhaps, in the future we might see the iPad or other devices like it, be used in schools for delivering instructional, interactive content. They might serve as rich clipboards for carrying and streaming medical information in a hospital or other medical centers. As for Facebook and Twitter, while they are still mostly used for entertainment, they have also been useful for pushing up-to-minute status of things going on in places of political unrest or from the hospital rooms. When I was at the hospital with my daughter after her surgery, I used Facebook to provide continual updates to my friends and family about her condition.

So maybe Obama's comments simply lack imagination of how these devices could be more useful in the future. And I believe it's also true that some of the most significant technological innovations start out as toys.

could, perhaps, maybe

This is the problem; who is starting/making this paradigm shift? And can they cause such a shift to remove the bias towards entertainment and information overload.

Sure, there are lots of examples (Iran for example) of the utility of modern media. But currently the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad - and getting worse.

That, I think, is the point.

Yes, and maybe television will be used to bring education and culture to the masses.

Television (and movies, and telephones, and newspapers) _have_ brought education and culture to the masses. Really. Go back in time a couple of hundred years and talk to some regular folks. Salt 'o the Earth, industrious (maybe), and worldly even, but _not_ educated or culturally sensitive in great numbers. It's important to remember that the teeming masses didn't use all that time they spent not watching television reading Shakespeare and Newton...

Nor have they spent all the time they do watch television watching Shakespeare or learning physics.

No, but more of them are doing it now than in Shakespeare's time. (Okay, they were watching it on stage rather than on TV; the period's equivalent of soap operas and sitcoms...)

As a percentage and in absolute numbers there are more educated people, by nearly anyone's definition of education, than at any time in history up to now. And television, mass communication in general, plays a large part in that.

As hard as it is for many to imagine, a lot of what passes for junk culture and time wasting trivia these days will be considered high art in the future. Future pundits will decry how the youth of the country are wasting their time with the latest feelie dramas and grab-o-vision media instead of partaking of more uplifting fare like downloading _Maru, the box cat_ and staying up all night playing _Tomb Raider_...

See, you're changing the goalposts. I'm talking about TV, you're talking about mass media in general. I'm comparing, say, 1945 and 1965, you're comparing 1810 and 2010. (Or 1610 and 2010.) There are too many confounds and you can't just throw everything since then (wider college education, mass publication) in with television as if they're even remotely the same thing.

I know there are a handful of TV series that constitute legitimate art, and an even rarer handful of those which are even popular. But by and large, TV isn't an improvement to the average person's level of culture or education. It's not necessarily a setback, but it's not an improvement, either.

Go back and read your parent post. The discussion is clearly mass media, or at least the effect of new media on society.

As someone who grew up in the 50s and 60s I can tell you from first hand experience that TV was used massively for education, and that it had a profound effect. Was it used for other things? Things more visible? Sure. Is all TV educational? That's a harder question to answer; note my point about what is considered culture at any given time. Sturgeons Law applies to TV like everything else, so we can't only judge a form by its worse 90%...

As for broading the discussion, which I refute, it's impossible to discuss the effects of one mass communication medium without discussing it within its context. At least not very meaningfully. If you scan around the posts on this page you'll find a post from me making references to the history of reading, writing and printing.

You started the discussion by responding to me, not the other way around. And I was talking specifically about the example of television. I don't think every new media has the same effect on society. If you think otherwise, you need to actually argue that point instead of just handwave it away as an assumption.

You've taken my point ("television failed to fulfill its promise as a source of education and culture for the masses"), ignored it, and instead responded to a straw man ("the aggregate of changes in mass media since the Elizabethan era have not improved the level of education and culture in the general population"). And then when I call you out on it, you tell me "the discussion is clearly about more than television". My point was about television, you can respond to whatever straw men you like but don't pretend it's a response to my point.

No, I _entered_ the discussion by responding to you...

OP was about new media, communications tech, iPads, etc. The parent post was about more of the same. Your response implied that TV didn't have a positive effect on education; which you didn't state explicitly, but your comment could only make sense to someone who understood the larger context of the discussion. So my bringing in media other than TV would seem to be OK.

It's impossible to discuss the effects of media in isolation from history, precedence and context. Okay, that isn't true; but I would argue it's impossible to _usefully_ discuss the effects of media, especially a mass communication medium, like television, without looking at it in a broader context.

If anything, it seems to me that you've taken a useful discussion and tried to limit its scope to a single point of supposed failure and tried to extend that failure to the entire topic. And rather than to responding to any of my points directly, you are arguing about form and context. I hope you'll excuse me if I tried to drag the discussion back toward relevance...

Television has had a massive effect on education in many parts of the world. Some first world, some third world. I could list hundreds (thousands) of shows that have been considered a success and have affected mass audiences. Do you really need me to make such a list? Start with Sesame Street, the Bell Labs science series, oh, I don't know, nearly every PBS station's daytime instructional schedule for the last 40 years. In many third world countries broadcast television is the major source of daily schooling. I'm talking teacher and black board somewhere else and children in a remote area gathered around the village TV set hooked up to a satellite dish. (These days I suspect this scene is played out out with internet satellite based technology.) Someone is watching all that TV. And notice that I'm not even considering whether or not the explosion of Discovery/Learning/A&E/DIY/Indie type channels are of educational value (I vote yes.)

If you want to do some additional reading on the subject, I can recommend Arthur Clarke's excellent collection of essays on the subject of modern communications technology _How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village_.

No if you want to argue that the bulk of TV is junk, I wouldn't disagree with you, hence my reference to Sturgeons Law. If you wanted to argue that the infrastructure for TV, and most mass communication in general (opps!!! there I go again!!!) is funded and driven by things other than purely educational goals, many of them not so noble... Whelp, yep, you're right. But so what? That doesn't make the education benefits not there, and that doesn't mean that the technology is worthless (I would argue, as I did, that what you think is education and what other people might find of value in broadening and enlightening their world might be different.)

As someone who grew up when TV was (relatively) rare, and has lived to see such an explosion in instant, nearly frictionless mass communication, I find it incredible that someone could think that TV has had little positive effect on education. Color me puzzled...

I think we're talking past each other a little here, but you're probably right that TV has had a positive impact. I'm still dubious whether it's a net positive impact--television displaced books, after all--but my wider point is that by and large, the bulk of television programming falls closer to the worst case outcome than the best case outcome.

I'm actually more optimistic about the internet, because like books, the internet at least encourages literacy. At least so I thought, until bandwidth increased to the point where the internet became another TV. Now I'm dubious. I see the early internet and TV as going in completely opposite directions, though, hence my reluctance to conflate all advances in media as having the same effects.

"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, - none of which I know how to work - information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation"

100 years ago, people had less truly leisure time. Books were not as common and news didn't travel fast. I got to see photos of the plane going down in the Hudson minutes after it happened thanks to twitter and an iPhone. We are still adjusting to the new world and it will be some time before the filters get internalized. It isn't the gadgets its biology.

Now the quote. I find it disappointing for two different reasons. The first is simply that I felt we had elected a technology clued in President. It seems that was either a lie or he is being disingenuous in his speech. I really have a tough time believing he doesn't know how to work and iPod.

The second problem is that I hate how he claimed ignorance to make himself look better than the people he was admonishing. There were so many ways to give that speech that would have not put down geeks. "I don't play with those things so I am cool" cliche of his speech writer is a little heavy.

Is it possible we are just temporarily distracted by all the amazing advancements that have developed in a very short period of time? New technology is very fun and exciting for most people. There may come a time when this always-on, constantly updated tendency has lost a bit of its luster and we will get down to business with tools that are multitudes more powerful than those our parents had.

That's a great point. We haven't been exposed to information overload long enough to develop wisdom about it and be inoculated against it.

I think people are overly poopooing the iPad's effect on the world. I think people who buy them INSTEAD of a computer for anyone born since 1950 is being a moron. However I think 99% of people who use them view them as a device slightly more mobile as a laptop which is nice for certain activities, and is a nice auxiliary.

I know I personally have used it to answer quite a few emails (but then again, if I was buying it for just personal use, I likely wouldn't have; I'm a professional iPad dev), as well as keep up on rss feeds and used it as a pdf reader.

Isn't Mr Obama on a Blackberry in half the candid shots we see of him?

Yes, and it is mentioned in the article ;)

I read this as 'don't hate the playa hate the game' If somebody wants to use their iPad to play Farmville, great for them. They can and still will find something just as pointless or stupid to do without the iPad or without Facebook. Just because it lets you do some pointless crap doesn't make it a bad tool, and it certainly doesn't mean that everyone who uses the tool is using it for that pointless crap.

Technology use does not distract us from political engagement: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_media_is_slowly_...

Tyler Durden: The things you own end up owning you.

Information can be a thing too. Sometimes information liberates us, and in other circumstances it weighs on us.

Obama is right.

From Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society:

"We are constrained to be 'engaged,' as the existentialists say, with Technique."

Daniel Lyons is rotting our brains.