[Rant] Nothing New

Media navel-gazing has been ratcheted up in the past couple of weeks, what with facebook violating privacy and scamming kids, and social media in general screwing up your head. It's sleazy cousin, clickbait, turns out to be equally distasteful, but it's the only way media companies can stay in business, unless of course you're the biggest clickbait producer in the world, in which case you are desperately dumping payroll. Whee.

All this reminds me of how old I am because I can't see it as anything new or worth getting exorcised about. The effect of media ubiquity on our lives was foreseen many years ago, it's just amplified. Here is Marshall McLuhan from The Media is the Message in 1967:

In the past, the effects of media were experienced more gradually, allowing the individual and society to cushion their impact to some degree. Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at very least our comfort and happiness,is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values, and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If...we continue in our subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

That's 1967 kiddies. We had three TV channels, FM radio (just barely), and dialing a phone meant dialing.

Want some more? This is Stefan Zweig from The World of Yesterday in 1938:

But travelling, even as far as to other worlds under other stars did not allow me to escape Europe and my anxieties. It seems almost like Nature's fierce revenge on mankind that the achievements of technology through which we have taken her mysterious forces into our own hands simultaneously destroy the soul. The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening anywhere in the world at the hour and second when it happened.

1938. For 80 years this transformation has been going on. Did it accelerate with the Internet? OK maybe, but media ubiquity has been going to destroy our souls for almost a century now. Multiple generations have lived and died with their souls destroyed by the media. Yet here we are, doing pretty well, making progress in the crazy, haphazard, 10-steps-forward-9-steps-back way of humanity.

So maybe take ten- to twenty-percent off over there Squirrely Dan. (Apologies for the Letterkenny quote, ya pheasants.) All that stuff you see that's going to destroy the world, isn't. Trust me. It's nothing new. Nothing is new.