Re: MeToo Children's Program

[mdj <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

On Jul 21, 3:59 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
> > It extends at least as far as Australia, where the television is
> > drenched in banal (mainly US produced) pop media that numbs the brain.
>
> I think that the transformation of the media world into one huge
> Short Attention Span Theater is most associated with "modernity",
> and the US has always been a big purveyor of modernity, for better
> or worse.  ;-)

I'm certainly not implying it's a US specific phenomena. It's far more
cost effective for local broadcasters to purchase ready-made content
than produce their own.

In fact, an economic explanation would seem the most parsimonious; any
organisation motivated by profit will gravitate towards products with
the highest margin. In media, this means the cheapest to produce
content that people will still consume. Publicly funded broadcasters
are important. Certainly here, they produce and acquire far higher
quality content than their commercial counterparts.

Of course, caveat emptor, and it's the buyers we should be concerned
with.

> >> Perhaps the problem is that we have learned to make devices
> >> to saturate our senses before learning the discipline not to
> >> overuse them to the point of desensitization.
>
> > Maybe I'm just too cynical, but it seems to me that societies power
> > brokers have always preferred a quiet, compliant population that
> > doesn't think too much. From the original broadcast medium of
> > clergyman on pulpit, through newsprint and to television today, there
> > has always been a steady supply of mind-numbingly vacuous
> > 'information' for the unwashed masses to consume.
>
> > I think you're spot on wrt education though - it's only through the
> > application of critical thinking that the mind becomes enlightened and
> > then demands quality. The problem is, how do you get a society to
> > value something the majority of people simply do not have?
>
> IIRC, Socrates devoted much of his life to a search for a way
> to "teach virtue" to the citizens of Athens...
>
> It didn't work out too well for either Socrates or Athens.  ;-)
>
> Perhaps we can do better this time--the stakes are certainly higher.

One would certainly like to think so, but I'm not convinced the
problem is any better understood now :-) At least in some countries I
suppose, lynching of outspoken intellectuals is frowned upon, albeit
only in the physical sense...

> I would superficially expect that the technorati (like us), with
> their engineering-discipline backgrounds, would tend to be quite
> good at critical thinking on the scale of the problems that confront
> us, but apparently "detailed thinking" and "global thinking" are
> different substances.  Studies have shown that the majority of
> engineers are rather narrowly focused, and prone to dogmatic belief
> rather than to critical examination of data and careful conclusion.

I suspect you could repeat the studies for any given field and get
similar (or worse) results.

It's an inherent paradox of pedagogy that whilst attempting to impart
the virtues of critical thinking and skepticism, the system demands
servility to authority. Socrates understood this dilemma well :-S I
guess we can only hope that subverting the credulity of youth (a human
feature) to promote reasoning based on faith (a human foible) is a
cultural affectation we'll grow out of ...

It's like the Buddhist who approaches the hot dog vendor and says
"Give me one with everything!"
Not having anything smaller, he hands the vendor a fifty. After
waiting a moment for his change he asks "What about my change?"

To which the vendor replies, "Change, comes only from within"

Matt