Of course I’m talking about the internet. I saw a link to Stephen Hawking this week where he stated there was no heaven. It took me to an AOL site called Weird which seems to be a perennial beat. It wasn’t Hawking that was weird , it was all the things on the same screen with his view of the Universe. “Any tweethearts out there?” A large ad for Argosy University which has as much value as a degree from Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge, Behold the Jesus fish stick. May is zombie awareness month.
This is an example of the great symbol drain noted by Neil Postman. Such sacred or serious symbols such as the flag, Jesus, Lincoln and Hawking are juxtaposed next to Donald Trump, Dennis Rodman and fish sticks.
Just as advertising has decimated the narrative on television it is now over-distracting the message on the laptop.
And speaking of the medium is the message: McLuhan! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: We hath need of thee. He predicted this as the waning of the literate print world was giving way to the acoustic, tribal visual world . Perhaps he wouldn’t even be surprised by Facebook and Twitter. After all, he coined the term “the global village”.
Where does that leave us in a world that won’t leave us alone
Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Leave your privacy at the door. Join a chat room and have a stranger call you names and insult you. Run a classified on Craigslist and have someone come over and kill you. Bump into a porn site and leave the house in handcuffs
There seems very little that is humane or rational on the web. It’s now all gossip or links to dubious commercial destinations. It trivializes the human condition but you can’t spoof a tsunami, or water down a flood or send up a plane crash. One of Dwight MacDonald’s prime examples of “Masscult” , the dumbing down of culture, was the new, simplified version of the King James Bible, robbed of its majestic language and reading like a press release. This was 60 years ago. What can we look forward to for the functionally illiterate high school graduate of the future: The King Jimmy Bible?
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