Deni’s Reviews > Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business > Status Update

Walter Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”

Още един автор от студентските години, който ще трябва да си припомня 😮‍💨 "Общественото мнение" here I come 🥴

"It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business."

Медията определя начина на презентация. Начина на презентация определя начина на мислене. Визуалната медия изисква забавление, не размисъл. И така, докато не забравим как се мисли като цяло. Sounds familiar?

"[...]every technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral."

"For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed."

Creeping normality. Провери го.

"Television has achieved the status of “meta-medium”—an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well."

Ако заместиш "телевизия" със "социални мрежи" ще е също толкова валидно. Това обяснява и защо Facebook се прекръстиха на Meta 🤷‍♀️

"But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the “information-action ratio.”

"As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded.[...] In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use."

"To them, mature citizenship was not conceivable without sophisticated literacy, which is why the voting age in most states was set at twenty-one, and why Jefferson saw in universal education America’s best hope. And that is also why, as Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager have pointed out, the voting restrictions against those who owned no property were frequently overlooked, but not one’s inability to read."

"[...] to read law exclusively will damage the mind, “shackle it to the technicalities with which it has become so familiar, and disable it from taking enlarged and comprehensive views even of topics falling within its compass.”

Това се отнася за всяко едно нещо. В противен случай се получава това, което става в момента с ИИ: храни се от собствения си слоп и започва да халюцинира все по-тежко #fuckAI

"This is especially the case with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, they become confused, they over-generalize, they abuse logic and, sometimes, common sense. The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one’s responses are isolated, one’s intellect thrown back on its own resources."