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In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.
[...] Many Americans get their news filtered through late-night comedy and their outrages filtered through Saturday Night Live. They—we—turn to memes to express both indignation and joy.
[...] Postman today is best remembered as a critic of television: That's the medium he directly blamed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, for what he termed Americans' "vast descent into triviality," and the technology he saw as both the cause and the outcome of a culture that privileged entertainment above all else. But Postman was a critic of more than TV alone. He mistrusted entertainment, not as a situation but as a political tool; he worried that Americans' great capacity for distraction had compromised their ability to think, and to want, for themselves. He resented the tyranny of the lol. His great observation, and his great warning, was a newly relevant kind of bummer: There are dangers that can come with having too much fun.
In 1984, Americans took a look around at the world they had created for themselves and breathed a collective sigh of relief. The year George Orwell had appointed as the locus of his dark and only lightly fictionalized predictions—war, governmental manipulation, surveillance not just of actions, but of thoughts themselves—had brought with it, in reality, only the gentlest of dystopias. Sure, there was corporatism. Sure, there was communism. And yet, for most of the Americans living through that heady decade, 1984 had not, for all practical purposes, become Nineteen Eighty-Four. They surveyed themselves, and they congratulated themselves: They had escaped.
Or perhaps they hadn't. Postman opened Amusing Ourselves to Death with a nod to the year that had preceded it. He talked about the freedoms enjoyed by the Americans of 1984—cultural, commercial, political. And then he broke the bad news: They'd been measuring themselves according to the wrong dystopia. It wasn't Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. "In Huxley's vision," Postman noted, "no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history." Instead: "People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."
The vehicle of their oppression, in this case? Yep, the television. Which had, Postman argued, thoroughly insinuated itself on all elements of American life—and not just in the boob-tubed, couch-potatoed, the-average-American-watches-five-hours-of-television-a-day kind of way that is so familiar in anti-TV invectives, but in a way that was decidedly more intimate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/are-we-having-too-much-fun/523143/
Are we having tooooo much fun ?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 30 2017, @09:57PM (8 children)
Easy answer. Get bored, crack a book. For chronic boredom, get a job. If the job itself contributes to boredom, start another career. If you're half as smart as you think you are, and you can't cure your boredom, work on your education. In short, do something useful. Take up a hobby, like gardening, or animal breeding. Or auto repair, or remodeling. Or, maybe even do some charitable work.
I wonder how many of us here spend hours each week in front of a screen. And, how many hours. Presuming that most of us here have IQ's over 100, do you never get the feeling that you've totally wasted those hours, laughing at inane bullshit? Comedies that are so flat, that the producer has to supply canned laughter to cue the audience that it's time to laugh? And movies that are so absurd that we have coined the phrase "suspended disbelief". I recall a scene with Rambo walking along firing everything and everyone up with TWO freaking machine guns. FFS, you won't find very many people capable of holding a machine gun and firing it, let alone two. Ask our Mighty Buzzard - I understand that he was required to tote a machine gun around while in service.
Television rots your mind, and Neil Postman understood that. Today's internet is probably just as bad for most people. Windows 10 helps to demonstrate that.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 30 2017, @11:54PM (5 children)
For chronic boredom, get a job.
Boomer asshole detected. No, motherfucker, you get a fucking job, you smug piece of shit. Times have changed since you were young and stupid, you old moron. You can't just "get" a job anymore. The way the job market works today, you don't get the job unless you already have the job. That's right, the exact job you applied for, you need to be doing it already, at the exact same place you applied. This is what stupid fuckers like you fail to understand is called a Catch-22 situation. Human resources departments everywhere know very well the fact that eludes your stupid asshole brain, which is that jobs don't need people anymore. Now, you, die as soon as possible, senile old coot. Fuck you to hell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @01:17AM (3 children)
Boomer asshole detected. No, motherfucker, you get a fucking job, you smug piece of shit. Times have changed since you were young and stupid, you old moron. You can't just "get" a job anymore. The way the job market works today, you don't get the job unless you already have the job. That's right, the exact job you applied for, you need to be doing it already, at the exact same place you applied. This is what stupid fuckers like you fail to understand is called a Catch-22 situation. Human resources departments everywhere know very well the fact that eludes your stupid asshole brain, which is that jobs don't need people anymore. Now, you, die as soon as possible, senile old coot. Fuck you to hell.
Don't hold back. Tell us how you *really* feel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @05:02AM (1 child)
U+1F3BB
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 01 2017, @08:32AM
That's one way to spell "fuck you, got mine!"
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday May 01 2017, @10:35AM
I think he just did.
Ok, given I am now well into retirement age, I look back and see how fortunate I was to be able to have a decent paying job ( i.e. businesses wanted my expertise enough to pay me pretty well for working for them ) compared to what I see today, with way too many STEM graduates vying for a small fraction of the jobs which were available when I was coming through.
I think the guy's spot-on with his frustration with finding a job. I tried too, with all the experience I had when I was laid off from aerospace. His story is the same as mine. We simply don't do that ( in my case, electronic design ) in USA anymore. Even my trade mags have ceased to exist.
I am of the strong impression that if I am ever to work again in the thing I love to do, I will have to create my own job.
The only old farts anyone wants are the old farts who know someone else who has the power to spend yet someone else's money... i.e. knows a Congressman.
Who gives a damn about control system theory? Just buy a smart controller and be done with it - just press the "autoset" button. You spend all this money getting educated on the "modern" languages, and they are out of date by the time you have completed all the requirements for a degree. I may know how to design nearly any interface imaginable, but you can also find those interfaces somewhere on the internet, so why hire me to build one?
I've come far short of regaining meaningful employment since layoff.
I can only imagine the problems younger people having far less experience than I are having.
Their prime strength is they are likely more enthusiastic ( well, I was before I experienced the ignominy of being micromanaged ), and are more likely to accept a job for peanuts.
Their prime weakness is their inexperience will lead them to repeat the same things I found out when I spent way too much time pursuing "gusts of wind".
I believe a lot of us here know that years of experience have a tendency to form pretty well-tuned bullshit detectors.
While modern business methods seem to have gravitated more toward salesmanship ( artful lying to investors ) rather than production of robust product.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 01 2017, @04:29AM
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday May 01 2017, @01:20AM (1 child)
Next poll question then?
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday May 01 2017, @04:56AM
Sure - go with it. I suppose that honesty requires me to admit that I sit in front of a "screen" for several hours per week. But, my screens are interactive. So, we'll need a couple choices for computers - one for entertainment, another for "other".