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From Luciano Floridi's book The Fourth Revolution:
I know that every generation thinks it is special just because it is alive and hence uniquely placed, reflectively, between the dead and the unborn. So I agree that it is important to keep things in perspective. However, sometimes it is 06 December 1773 and you are in Boston, or it is 04 July 1789 and you are in Paris. What I stress in this book is that sometimes it is a new millennium, and you are in the infosphere.
I assume that salvation will be brought about, insofar as it ever is, using the tools available, even as the same ones destroy us.
I hope you find it.
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The screens are our downfall, but I live so much of my life through the screen, how can I but hope they are our salvation, too?
Wow, is that powerful!
Precisely. Let's do all we can to prevent them be our ruin, for we really don't have any other way
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You know, I read things like this, and I can feel myself bucking against it. I want to say this is just more of "the kids these days" kind of thinking. Because I do believe that the times change -- just as the kids these days are all influencers, 50 Cent said he was just tyrin' to get his email on, and kids in the 80s were tying up the phone lines, and before that the Fonz was in to civil rights -- seems to me a bit rich that this one time the youth are screwed up, when before all their horrible proclivities turned out to be fondly remembered.
But. C S Lewis also said this: "Just as, if we stripped the armour off a medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an anatomy identical with our own, so, it is held, if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honour, from Lucretius his Epicurean philosophy, and from all who have it their religion, we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate."
Lewis didn't buy it, I don't think. And it is possible that we are dementing ourselves. That our cultures can cripple us, change our traits, our biology even -- that the tiktok scrolling, goon-cave hiding, influencer supporting folly of this generation is something different, something that will do irreparable harm.
Going back on myself again, though, I doubt (perhaps unfairly) that the writers of these articles have spent very much time cock in hand. Thing is, there are addicts and there are people who write about addicts, and rarely are they the same. And the pronouncements about addicts made by the non-addicts are rarely worth very much when it comes to understanding what's gong on with the addicts.
Continuing on this concept of the theory of the unchanging human heart, Lewis says "For the truth is that when you have stripped off what the human heart actually was in this or that culture, you are left with a miserable abstraction totally unlike the life really lived by any human being." I would say the same is true for the goonerization of life argument: when the whole culture is said to be gooners, absorbed in self-love, we've stopped talking about people at all.
I'm still so stuck in my addiction, I can't help but recognize the smeagol in the influencer and the gooner. The screens are our downfall, but I live so much of my life through the screen, how can I but hope they are our salvation, too?