It is common to hear the abjections of individuals to the ever changing society around them. This is nothing new to human history, with every technological advancement, every societal stride, there have been the pessimists and reactionaries wishing to bring everything back to the Launchpad of human civilization. At the present, humanity is experiencing unprecedented innovation and advancement. Knowledge in every branch of science is expanding exponentially, and technology is becoming better capable, less costly, and more integrated into society than ever before. This rapid advancement up the civilization tech tree means that generations separated by a mere few decades are having drastically different life experiences. Individuals who grew up
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This certainly is a cowardly and shallow response from the audience to such a scene, though the response should not be attributed to the forms of new media used by the students, but instead to human nature itself for there are plenty of similar incidences from the past were an audience acted with the same level of pusillanimity as that in Lam’s example. Of those alarmed by the societal changes brought about by new media, there seems to be a common tendency to invoke “good old days” sentiment. Usually this pandering to the credulous comes in the form similar to Sherry Turkle’s statement “In the past, one waited for the sound of the post – by carriage, by foot, by truck. Now, when there is a lull, we check our emails, texts, and messages” (Turkle,2011). This kind of attitude is baseless and simply reactionary yet it is held by many of the commentators on the effects of new media. Commentators like Lam and to a lesser extent Turkle fail to see past the surface of new media usage. To them an individual who is engaged in social media is nothing more than a person captivated by a computer monitor, when in reality the individual is using the computer monitor to interact, communicate, and express themselves in ways that would have been impossible only a brief decade ago (Gopnik,2011). A quote from Alison Gopnik best summarizes the views held by Lam and others like him, “the year before you were born looks like Eden, the year after your children were born looks like Mad Max” (Gopnik,2011). The digital word is an amazing place, and the fact that it is distinct from the actual reality around us does not devalue its usefulness in making our
This certainly is a cowardly and shallow response from the audience to such a scene, though the response should not be attributed to the forms of new media used by the students, but instead to human nature itself for there are plenty of similar incidences from the past were an audience acted with the same level of pusillanimity as that in Lam’s example. Of those alarmed by the societal changes brought about by new media, there seems to be a common tendency to invoke “good old days” sentiment. Usually this pandering to the credulous comes in the form similar to Sherry Turkle’s statement “In the past, one waited for the sound of the post – by carriage, by foot, by truck. Now, when there is a lull, we check our emails, texts, and messages” (Turkle,2011). This kind of attitude is baseless and simply reactionary yet it is held by many of the commentators on the effects of new media. Commentators like Lam and to a lesser extent Turkle fail to see past the surface of new media usage. To them an individual who is engaged in social media is nothing more than a person captivated by a computer monitor, when in reality the individual is using the computer monitor to interact, communicate, and express themselves in ways that would have been impossible only a brief decade ago (Gopnik,2011). A quote from Alison Gopnik best summarizes the views held by Lam and others like him, “the year before you were born looks like Eden, the year after your children were born looks like Mad Max” (Gopnik,2011). The digital word is an amazing place, and the fact that it is distinct from the actual reality around us does not devalue its usefulness in making our