"Learning to love the new media" response

In reading this article, a lot of concerning things caught my eye. The first being how focused on the here and now that the whole of the country is becoming. To quote the article, 

"Sometimes it's difficult to keep everybody focused on the long term. The things that are really going to matter in terms of America's success 20 years from now, when we look back, are not the things that are being talked about on television on any given day."

This hit me pretty hard because I am not super involved in learning about "what's going on" in the world - I don't watch the news much and I am very picky about the "news" that I do let myself read. I believe that this quote is a good part of the reason I don't pay much attention to the television news, or the front page of yahoo.com (or other news sites). They are too busy reporting about Britney Spears' new haircut, or which celebrity couple has broken up, gotten together, or exploded in a firey drunken rage at so-and-so's hip-and-happening club on the boulevard. 

These are not things I concern myself with, and if I'm being completely honest, it makes me terribly sad that a lot of the general populous fool themselves into thinking that they do care about these things. That in their daily life, the style of boots that Bratt Pitt is wearing will affect how they go about doing their chores. They believe, since they are told to believe, that these are the things that matter.

I'm not sure if this is to do with the obsession with celebrity that America has, or that America is trying to distract the populous from the real news, the real issues, the things that will, in fact, inform a citizen's daily life. It is probably very much to do with both of these things, the celebrity obsessed probably stems and grows from the want of the government (and others in power) to keep citizens at ease, controllable, and easily impressionable.

I'm currently re-reading the book Farenheit 451, and it is fascinating how a book published in the 50's could speak so well to how actual life has turned out to be abouf 60 years later. The populous with the "seashells" (headphones) in their ears, listening to what the government and the social media wants us to know. Paying most attention to what they want us to feel is important. Watching their television-walls and relating to their "family" of characters being projected at them. 

It also fascinates me how this book is a required reading in many high schools, and still nothing is changing. It seems that readers do realize and recognize the similarities and frightfulness of those similarities between the book and our current world, but somehow can shrug it off as coincidence, or as something that isn't to be concerned with. It seems so unlikely that we will ever have "firemen" who burn our books and arrest us for owning books and thinking on our own, but I'm not sure if that thought is actually such a ridiculous one at all.

I'm certainly getting off track, here, I'll try to reign myself back into my response to the article "learning to love the new media", while still relating it to my previous almost-rant.

Another quote in the article,

"We have created a technology that has wonderful potential, but increases our ability to lie to ourselves and forget it is a lie."

This is a particurlarly scary thought. And a thought that has already proven itself true many times, through the quick spreading of rumor on the internet. Many times already have people read and heard wrongs on websites and passed on the information to others, believing it to be truths. Whether or not the website has made a mistake, or whether it is a cruel joke, many internet rumors grow and grow, are passed and passed (similar to the childhood game "telephone") until they are however skewed and very much believed to be truth until, hopefully and finally, they will be proven to be either true or false.

An upside to the internet being always editable is that when a rumor has grown into what is believed as a truth - it is usually just as easy to set this rumor to rest by posting the actual truth to the internet, where the cycle starts over and hopefully passed along and along through the same sort of path and correcting everyones' previous untruthful beliefs.

As far as I forsee, there isn't really a solution to this problem. The internet exists, and every individual will just need to be more and more aware of where they are getting their information, and whether their sources are trustworthy.