As per the thread regarding some guy doing laundry, to the seemingly endless variety of junk luring us ever-back to the screen, we as human society have been converted as though mesmerized into a near-complete group of "yes" folk. Virtually everywhere people wander about gazing at their palms, oblivious to hazards to their immediate health, the beauty of their surroundings, the time of day or night, the sense of the immediate future. This is the legacy created by the far-thinking folks like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and the like. The first guy is currently being publicly scathed, the second died being claimed a corporate tyrant, and the third I have conserved reservation for, having heard him speak several times. I do not think any of them were initially money-grubbers, but they certainly irreversibly changed our world! Frank
I think it started with television. I recall sitting in the barber shop and there was some little kid in one of the waiting chairs, slack-jawed and in a trance-like state. He was staring at the TV. It was a news station. It was nothing that meant anything to him. But he was mind-melded to it. It does not matter what is "on." Such great potential to educate, and look at what we do with it. This is not a new observation. And now computers and smart phones have accelerated the decline. At least television was confined to a room...this stuff travels (I think this aspect of "influence us on the go" began with transistor radios.) On the flip side, computers have certainly created lots of jobs, lots of careers, have enabled people to live where they want and not be tied to an office or a geography (I remote-worked for the last years of my career.) Of course, the quality and true value of those jobs might be up for debate. I do agree that a number of people have allowed it to consume them. There is a thread here that has a pic of a boat full of people going through some scenic place, and most of them are viewing it through their cell phone screens as they take pics & vids. I was saying that I'd keep my camera in my pocket (unless there were something unique going on) and just enjoy being there...there are plenty of better pics on the web for me to look at later and I would not want to miss the experience. The really creepy thing about that pic of screen-transfixed people is that they are converting real reality into their preferred manifestation of it...that whatever is on those screens is the only Real, and in order to truly experience whatever is in front of them, it's got to be displayed in that format.
We all are a product of the environment. Texting, and phone video have replaced actual phone calls, and video calls have replaced visiting in body form. I miss that. The end of almost every episode of Blue Bloods is the Sunday dinner time with family. No one has or wants to make time for that type of togetherness anymore. I have always claimed - the bigger the progress, the bigger the problem. I still believe this.
I agree with that. The destruction of the family has destroyed any opportunity to have "time" and "togetherness," for those who were interested in it in the first place. I commented elsewhere that viewing things on a screen has move validity as "reality" than actual reality does. It's frightening as well as depressing.
Being a victim and realizing it gives us the option of slowing down how much we have to process but being the victim of a victim(s) has all sorts of ramifications. With so many avenues that have enabled a whole generation or two to produce “wokeness, Karens and the like we who control how we use our devices have become victims of victims.
A lot of those people are fabricated so the media can magnify them. PBS ran a special on Greta Thunberg the other day. She's a teenage "climate activist" who flies all over the world (not under her own power) screaming at adults for "ruining her future." Who decided she gets all this attention? And what the heck does some teenage kid know? Or Cindy Sheehan. She's certainly different because she lost her son in war, but when Bush was in power, you saw her in the media all the time. Obama is in power and Cindy's still around, she just stopped getting coverage.
Why don't you think they were greedy to start with ? I think as with most people That was likely how they were born and raised - to seek money, and it grew monstrously to seek money no matter what the cost (loss of soul(s), live(s), life) .
Not to derail this thread , per se, but realize this was how the world was deceived by the virus theory. Imaginary fairy tale took over instead of reality.
Again we have people who are on stage who know nothing about what they’re raving about and are getting tremendous accolades for what they have to say. Greta’s mother is an opera singer and her dad is an actor. Her sister is also a singer with selective mutism and is ADHD and Greta has Aspergers. Somehow, the mother (I think) won the Martin Luther King’s award for peace and some other award which was the springboard for getting Greta some recognition and the media’s daughter took off from there. With no real empirical data the entire U.N. is on board with everything Greta and her parents have to say and the I.T. age media is directly responsible for that response. Even science and statistical data doesn’t have as much pull as a teenage girl with asperger syndrome.
One other thing I noticed whilst out driving. How many of us have been subjected to being behind a car wherein the driver is more interested in a conversation he or she is having on their cell phone than the light that turned green 20 seconds ago? Better yet, how many ARE the perpetrators of said action causing a myriad of drivers to go into some sort of stress related emotional verbal, mechanical (horns) and single finger outpourings?
As a parallel issue to this, everyone in the world is being sold to every minute of every day. Marketing to us is a refined science, and we are immersed in it from the moment we are born. There are programs about the best commercials we've seen. Commercials airing during the Super Bowl are actually previewed before they air!!! So not only are we perpetually tethered to the conduits of advertising, the techniques that tell us which brand of underwear to buy are seamlessly applied to tell us which political position to take, who is our friend and who is our enemy, and that an ordinary piece of cloth has magical one-way virus filtering capabilities.
My current car ties the phone into the stereo speakers for hands-free talking. It will even read a text message to me, although I cannot reply while in motion. Before that, phone calls always went to voice mail. I never talked on the phone while driving. When I was buying my home here and was getting calls from real estate agents and mortgage lenders, I would let the call go to voice mail, then find a place to pull over and call them back. I'm not super-perfect, I just know that I cannot divide my attention like that. And for some reason it's different than conversing with a passenger. That being said, I've never been one of those who lives on his phone or gets lots of calls from friends or kids. If I did, I might have behaved differently.
Fruit of the Loom oughta get in on the virus thing. Men’s drawers have a Full double flap in front with move weaves per inch than any mask ergo if the Loom folks took advantage of that theory then there’d be a bunch of people looking out of the leg holes in a pair of men’s tightly whities. With hearts. Or a Hurray for Harris.
@Jeff Elohim But, you make it sound as though the "modern entrepenours" have acted conspiritorily in their endeavors, as perhaps compared to early ones like Edison, Bell, and Ford? Has the springboard been changed over history? Frank