Posted on 07/30/2014 6:10:31 PM PDT by BlopAndStop
PROGRESS?
Some technology represents unquestioned progress, despite causing real challenges to the employment prospects of citizens who are made redundant. For example, recent advances in science and medicine have merely scratched the surface in terms of enhancing our ability to find cures for diseases in an increasingly focused way at sharply diminished cost. Also, the technology of moving people and goods in vehicles and organizing their movement on roads contains tremendous opportunities for cost and energy efficiencies, as do the areas of resource extraction, the development of alternative energy and the efficiency of food production. These are just a few obvious and impactful areas in which technological progress has lots of headroom for human betterment.
On the other hand, some technological progress is not really progress at all. Innovations in the technology of communications, including social media, provide increasingly powerful and robust platforms to disseminate information. Unfortunately, these same increasingly powerful and robust platforms are also used to spread information that is untrue, and to package information in tiny bits of faux-knowledge that (because of their sheer volume) leave little room for neither more comprehensive reading nor discussion and contemplation. This fact reinforces our view that young people need to be taught the basics as early as possible – of history, political science, philosophy and civilization. In the absence of that grounding, all of these Twitter and Facebook bits alight on a population that lacks the tools to sort or analyze what they are reading while scrunched over their Androids. (Interesting word, Android; maybe in a thinly-veiled joke, it is meant to describe the hooked users and not the device...)
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
Government education and media is making people dumber
Paul Singer?
Who cares what he thinks?
“Modern science has led to a prodigious increase of information about phenomena in formerly unexplored or neglected fields, but in so doing it has not brought man any closer to the depths of reality, but has rather distanced and estranged him from them; and what nature “really” is, according to science, escapes any concrete intuition”
- Evola
Social media is like TV. It only makes you dumber if you want it to make you dumber.
It’s a medium like radio, television, the Internet as a whole, newspapers, etc. Can be used for good or evil.
Government certainly does use social media as a tool to dumb-down America as well as to spy on us.
We’ve allowed pro-Regime creeps in the Bay Area / San Francisco to oversee social media, that’s what’s really dangerous.
I’m sure smart phone addiction fits in here somewhere.
All communication all the time is NOT necessarily a good thing. In fact, IMHO, it’s a damaging thing.
+1
Have you noticed how that many “conservative” news sites such as Fox outrageously force readers to comment through Facebook..
Zuckerberg’s philosophy represents the opposite of conservatism.....gun control, destruction of even the concept of privacy, destruction of sovereignty, open borders, etc. Why would conservatives even collaborate?
Facebook: Boring beyond words.
Twitter: What is this for? Other than a quick way of getting fired if you post the wrong 140 character description of your company or your boss.
Pinterest: I have no idea what the point of this is.
I agree.
In fact, I'm positive much of technology is damaging to society's well being.
I find that people today are working nearly 24/7 because they are constantly connected to their office no matter where they are, and expected to work, work, work---ELSE it will be cheaper to offshore their jobs (again, thanks to technology) to some developing country where the work can be done super cheap.
This technology so many marvel at, is making people have to race against the machine.
And while I'm at it another thing: if you think technology is a boon to your business, realize this: your competitor also benefits from that same technology, so it's not helping you one bit.
Twenty-five years ago a friend of mine was a CPA starting his own practice.
He was telling me how wonderful his tax preparation software was, how he could prepare twice as many tax returns in a day.
I told him not to be so happy, because his competition would experience the same benefit.
Means his competition could charge client's half the price, and steal my friend's clients away if he also doesn't slash his prices.
Sure, wonderful stuff this technology.
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