Orkutting ourselves to death (The Final part)

Neil Postman in his book ‘Amusing ourselves to Death’ said, “Television is our cultures principal mode of knowing itself.” ( Johnson 2005:62) But now Google has become our cultures principle mode of knowing itself. And unlike other media the internet is a participatory communication media. Steve Jobs likes to describe the difference between television and web as the difference between lean-back and sit-forward media (Johnson 2005:118). But Neil Postman believes there is a problem with networking technologies like internet and primarily the computer. A few excerpts from his speech ‘Informing ourselves to Death’:
I believe I know something about what technologies do to culture, and I know even more about what technologies undo in a culture. The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking.
This pessimism towards the internet and its effects is further heaped on by L.X.Jerome in his article ‘Mediated youth culture’ where he says that the television and computer have made our thinking and discourse highly fragmented, incoherent, trivial and above all, entertaining. Jerome comically asks us to imagine the media telling us-
‘Dear Reader/Viewer, the world is too complicated. But we make it easy for you and give the world in easy doses. All you need to do is simply to swallow. Just swallow it. Just do it.’
The dangers of the internet are further exaggerated by Bernado M. Villegas in his article ‘Social impact of new communication Technologies’ who says-
Many fret that the world can be morally corrupted by the internet….These phobias…are based on fears that are a result of actual occurrences cyperporn, incitement to violence or racial hatred, etc.-there has arisen in all countries a call for censorship and other government regulations. The article then goes on to sat that ‘an orderly society may be traded off more readily with personal freedom [is personal freedom a bad thing?] as Asians discover the new media such as the Internet and satellite TV’.
But the internet is like all new technologies which have its cynics when relatively new. But as the days go by the youth generally nod off the danger signs and plunge into its vicissitudes for the good.
Steven Johnson in his book ‘Everything Bad is Good for you’ argues:
‘The screen is not just something you manipulate, but something you project you identity onto, a place to work through the story of your life as it unfolds.’
(Johnson 2005:119)
I am not going to argue with Postman’s claim that that the technology involved (the internet) is undoing culture but I am saying this undoing is for the good. And as for his claims that the computer and its information (i.e. the internet) cannot answer any fundamental questions we need to address, well it does not have to for the internet was man made not a holy grail which answers life’s questions. But the internet does make our lives more meaningful and humane. It does provide an organizing moral framework. It frees us from the cultural hegemony that binds us and teaches us about personal freedom. Aldous Huxley in his essay ‘Hallucinogens: A philosophers visionary prediction’ asks the question:
What can and what should the individual do to improve his ironically equivocal relationship with culture in which he finds himself embedded? How can he continue to enjoy the benefits of culture without at the same time being stupefied or frenziedly intoxicated by its poisons? (Huxley 1963:552)
My answer to these questions is to join the networking site Orkut and to be actively involved in Orkut Media and communities. (We shall not discuss Huxley’s answers which you can guess from title)
Time magazine in their cover page (dated Jan 2007) declared the ‘Person of the year’ as ‘You’ (the reader and the public in general). Because ‘You control the information Age. Welcome to your world.’ And time explains why we the common youth are special-
‘And we dint just watch (like with television), we also worked …We made facebook profiles [similar to Orkut]…reviewed books at Amazon and recorded pod casts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs when we got dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open source software [like Linux which Microsoft is working overtime to fend off].”
The article is about individuals around the world who would have gone unnoticed but for Orkut, YouTube, and the blogosphere.

References

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POSTMAN, NEIL,1986. Amusing ourselves to death. New York: Penguin Books.
JOHNSON, STEVEN, 2005. Everything Bad is Good for you. New York: Riverhead books.
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FRANKL, VIKTOR, 2004. Mans Search for meaning . Rider books
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POSTMAN ,NEIL Informing ourselves to Death (Online) http://www.frostbytes.com
[ Accessed Time 1600 Date 24th Oct 2007]