QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Sat 12th December 2009, 10:24pm)
The thrust of my assertion is not merely that Dubya³ allows isolated individuals to becomes as vapid as they wish to be — I am saying that there is an amplified entropism, a grubitational distraction, a selective devolutionary pressure that is dragging the whole mass of participants down into the depths, even those who are governed by other wishes, even those who resist as best they can.
That is the systematic part of the dynamics that demands to be explained.
Jon (IMG:
smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)
It is interesting, and I agree that it is not Teh InterWeb per se that is the problem, it just makes it all rather obvious.
I can see the same thing on TV, where once there was a creative zeal and it was seen that TV was an important medium of education and entertainment, but now - well, we don't do documentaries because there is no demand, people want to watch manufactured X-Factor pap, even though they know it is manufactured X-Factor pap and so on, people have time in their lives to watch several nightly soaps of despair & ignorance with no redeeming features.
Look at the music industry - if you went back to the hey-day of music creativity in the 60s and 70s, although there were cynical money making operations, a lot of bands were really in it because they felt it was important in its own right. I don't think Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Moody Blues, The Who, The Beatles or whatever were driven by financial motives so much as the desire to make music. It was fascinating to see a documentary on the German Krautrock movement to see how much it was politically driven. That creative urge seems to have been much diluted. There are still talented musicians, but they get subverted into the industry.
I think it comes down to a fundamental loss of direction of being unable to cope with leisure time. Perhaps we need a good world war or something (bring on that Global Warming!), but I think in the first world, the population has it fairly easy and is just looking for ways to fritter away the time. If life was more challenging, people would value their time more and be more demanding.