Monday, May 23, 2011

Irrelevance filled with Importance


I am probably way behind the curve on this one: The Best of You Tube. The site provides the most popular videos in a handy index for: Today/Yesterday/Week/Month/Year/All Time.

-From 'All Time' I enjoyed the surprising twist in choreography in 'First Wedding Dance as a Couple.'

-There is also the video of a cute German Shepherd pup grow to an adult in 40 seconds. (Our family enjoyed four German Shepherds over the course of 25 years and several litters of pups.)

You Tube was created by three former Pay Pal employees in February of 2005, and bought by Google in November of 2006 for $1.65 billion.

Finally, several sobering quotes from Neil Postman, media critic:

-Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose...

-"Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.

-When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

-Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.