June 9, 2024 12:40 pm

Adapting to new mediums

Technologies are aritificial, but - paradox again - artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it… such shaping of a tool to oneself, learning a technological skill, is hardly dehumanizing. The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, and intensify its interior life.

– Walter Ong Orality and Literacy, pg 81-82.

How long did it take for humans to interiorize writing and its tools? How long will it take for us to interiorize the network?

– Jeff Jarvis Gutenberg Parenthesis

In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country.

– Bad News Selling the story of disinformation by Joseph Bernstein