Having one foot in both eras - pre and post internet screens - I can clearly see that no activity that existed before (TV, "rock music", radio shows) was anywhere near as addictive
for me as the crack cocaine of smart phone apps. And I'm relatively inoculated against it. Relatively: Compared to people who never knew the world before.
Our parents weren't "addicted" to rock music. Reading a book is, objectively, infinitely better for your mind than watching even the most erudite educational video on YouTube, for the simple reason that you're required to visualize the content for yourself. This was common knowledge during the TV era. The only thing that made TV not the end of reason was that it was a large object that children couldn't drag with them everywhere.
No, it's not just an "old man" generational thing. The people raised in the smart phone era are different. This is a qualitatively different technology, a far more invasive and all-encompassing form of media than anything that's existed before, and it distorts the basic elements of what it means to be human, namely: *How one encounters others, how one encounters nature, and how one encounters oneself*. Three fundamental discoveries that are lost when they are discovered "for you" via a constant stream of videos, podcasts, news feeds, texts and blog posts in your pocket.
For the first time, it's possible to imagine a human who never discovers any of the basic things about life; who lives from cradle to grave being shown images of kangaroos and dolphins, watching shows about lovers and wars, without ever actually experiencing any of them, and being satiated with the constant flood of images presented, dying with no knowledge of anything besides the shadows on the cave wall. That is a fundamental shift in what we do as a society with human capital, what we teach children, and what it means to be an adult; and this is visible throughout every aspect of our current decline as a civilization. Listen to an interview on YouTube with random people on the street in 1960, on any subject, and you will hear voices from blue-collar high school educated people that are more eloquent - by habit of learning to communicate directly with others - than the most gifted podcasters are today.
So no, the difference here is not just "rock and roll" versus "big band". Or even printing press versus handwritten scrolls. It's a cheapening and denuding of the human landscape; and I say this as someone who spent most of my life building the systems that contributed to it and, superficially, am mostly enmeshed in it, understand it, and don't believe it should rob us of authenticity. But it does.
Rock and roll never robbed anyone of authentic experience. Neither did reading a book.
Our parents weren't "addicted" to rock music. Reading a book is, objectively, infinitely better for your mind than watching even the most erudite educational video on YouTube, for the simple reason that you're required to visualize the content for yourself. This was common knowledge during the TV era. The only thing that made TV not the end of reason was that it was a large object that children couldn't drag with them everywhere.
No, it's not just an "old man" generational thing. The people raised in the smart phone era are different. This is a qualitatively different technology, a far more invasive and all-encompassing form of media than anything that's existed before, and it distorts the basic elements of what it means to be human, namely: *How one encounters others, how one encounters nature, and how one encounters oneself*. Three fundamental discoveries that are lost when they are discovered "for you" via a constant stream of videos, podcasts, news feeds, texts and blog posts in your pocket.
For the first time, it's possible to imagine a human who never discovers any of the basic things about life; who lives from cradle to grave being shown images of kangaroos and dolphins, watching shows about lovers and wars, without ever actually experiencing any of them, and being satiated with the constant flood of images presented, dying with no knowledge of anything besides the shadows on the cave wall. That is a fundamental shift in what we do as a society with human capital, what we teach children, and what it means to be an adult; and this is visible throughout every aspect of our current decline as a civilization. Listen to an interview on YouTube with random people on the street in 1960, on any subject, and you will hear voices from blue-collar high school educated people that are more eloquent - by habit of learning to communicate directly with others - than the most gifted podcasters are today.
So no, the difference here is not just "rock and roll" versus "big band". Or even printing press versus handwritten scrolls. It's a cheapening and denuding of the human landscape; and I say this as someone who spent most of my life building the systems that contributed to it and, superficially, am mostly enmeshed in it, understand it, and don't believe it should rob us of authenticity. But it does.
Rock and roll never robbed anyone of authentic experience. Neither did reading a book.