Has anyone read "A Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley? In the book (written in 1932) Huxley suggests that our future will be one in which the truth will be drowned out with so much irrelevance that we will be reduced to passivity and egotism. Our culture will become trivial, there will be drugs created to keep us happy.... He stated "The civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In other words, he believed that eventually society would amuse itself to death.
If you'd like to read this book you can find it online for free at http://www.huxley.net/bnw/
There is also an interesting, much quicker-to-read comic strip about his theories as well as George Orwell's... http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=135828
What do you think? Any truth to that? Are we already there? Will this ever become completely true? Pretty insightful for a book written long before the general public really had a taste of mass media huh?
I think there is definitely some truth to this. It isn't beyond our control. We need to make some efforts to grab hold and make better use of what we have, which in due time once everyone becomes digitally literate, i think will happen. We aren't lost, we haven't fallen off of the deep end as he suggests people of today would...but we have fallen subject to many of his predictions. We enjoy distractions irrelevant information, possibly too much. Things like prozac exist, we do have pills that keep us happy. Strange how accurate some of his predictions were. Yet, I still don't think we are as messed up as claims. Then again, maybe we just aren't there yet.
The accuracy of Huxley's predictions remind me of McLuhan's spot-on predictions of media in "The Medium is the Massage." It is astonishing how many of Huxley's predictions were culminated by mass media. Sure, some of us need anti-depressants for extremely valid reasons, but television and internet advertising have opened the floodgates for people asking for drugs from their doctors that they don't really need. Twitter is a great source for instant relevant information, but it is an even bigger hub for celebrity gossip and egotism. Luckily, we haven't all fallen off the deep end. The advent of new media has given us new and extremely accessible forums for us to have intelligent conversations and bounce ideas off each other.
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