A worthwhile experience: PBS' Frontline: Digital Nation: Life On The Virtual Frontier (2010), directed and produced by Rachel Dretzin and walked through by Douglas Rushkoff. It's a sort of episodic adventure into the here and now of cyber reality, hopping like think bubbles from information overload to kids to classrooms to South Korean game addicts to avatar realities to drone pilots to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome treatment and so on. The last thirty minutes are worth the virtual price of admission. The disconnect between drone pilots and their killing machines (via Hellfire Missiles and the like) and physical realities thousands of miles away is truly creepy. Much like Terry Gilliam's prophetic film Brazil (1985), or Phlip K. Dick in general.
If curious, here's a link to the website and documentary:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/
From my own experience, teenagers seem more distracted because they actually are -- there are so many more outlets. They cut corners in every way possible -- because they can. But they, and those now in their twenties and even thirties, are avid multitaskers. The question is, are they also capable of deep thought? Is the ability to contemplate compromised by digital multitasking? Is it addictive behavior to such an extent that a whole new reality is being experienced? Is this the biggest shift in conciousness and new literacies since the printing press? I think, yes it is.
Today's Rune: Journey.
6 comments:
I sit here and nod at your assessment. It is hard to put, even for a few hours, the brakes on the train, get it to slow down for station stopping.
But I wonder what happens if the kids get to moving along as slow as we did when their reality is digital and constantly assaulting them from twenty different directions. Will the "thinkers" be able to keep up enough to ensure their own thriving?
Erik, My friends and family and I are always pondering our childrens future, what with their current influences. I see little or no curiosity,social interaction, ambition, or imagination. When you drive thru neighborhoods, you rarely see kids playing outside. I can't see how these 'skills' can possibly bode well for thier futures!
I read an article the other day (of course, I can't find it now,) about research that'd been done on today's "techno kids" (such as they are.) It revealed, in effect, that their brains are being rewired to maintain a constant state of only partial attention, that the ability to focus on only one thing at a time is being lost to them. As for multitasking...no one's good at that in reality, as other studies show.
Idiocracy, here we come.
This first set of documents I did not attend, only Brazil - the Film! that of Brazil, the film has much little. The music-subject of the film is the Watercolor of Brazil, composed classic for Ary Barroso. History - a scientific fiction on an unhappy, highly mentally ill society for the bureaucracy. A world more fantastic than the world of Blade Runner. How much to the digital medias, them social and mannering norms have the capacity to exert fort influence on the way of life of the people being dictated, creating symbols and signs that force many times the population to learn to deal with them to communicate themselves with some. Moreover, it is important to be outstanding that at the same time where the technician-scientific discoveries free the man of innumerable limits, them social goals do not offer easinesses to reach themselves, strengthening the exclusion of many of the segments of the society that they do not obtain to adhere to the modernization. Therefore, the cultural process, based in the digital age, acts of meeting with the social formation of the individual and with its internal significação and constitution. Good week! Beijus,
Thanks all for the intense and thoughtful comments. Much apreciated!
i.e. much appreciated ;->
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