Reading forces thinking. It is not possible to read even the most mindless of books without thinking where it is quite possible to half hear or half watch something. If you can get them to talk and write about it you move up even higher on the thinking scale to critical thinking and analyst. Once you reach that point the questionable parts are quickly discarded. Quickly? Seventy-five years of communism was a long time for many people. Sometimes a lot of pain and bloodshed happen before defective ideas are discarded.
I'm not against reading, learning, and thinking. But it does look like today's TV and computer games kids may end up doing less damage than the intellectuals and enthusiasts of a century ago.
Today's short-interest spans may repel many, but don't underestimate just how persistent an earlier generation was in clinging to ideas and illusions that were wrong and destructive. In totalitarian states, for every person who learns the truth through print there's at least one who's kept from the truth by the reading material that's available. I don't know that one can draw any sort of general lesson from comparisons, but it's at least plausible to me that newer media did more to bring down tyrannies than print could.
"...don't underestimate just how persistent an earlier generation was in clinging to ideas and illusions ..."
"What is a Meme?"
A meme isn't just any fleeting impression or random thought. One defining characteristic of a meme is that it reproduces itself with a fair degree of fidelity. A joke is a meme; so is the alphabet. One can argue that language is the ultimate meme (or "memeplex," as some call it). The sum of all memes is culture, transmitted from generation to generation, just as the genome is.
Meme theory proponents argue that, just as we're the pawns by which our genes compete for dominance, so are we the creatures of our memes. You've heard such expressions as "The concept took on a life of its own" or "
Never underestimate the power of an idea whose time has come," right? To memeticists, these aren't mere conceits but rather reflections of the true state of affairs.
You're saying: Get out. I'm the boss of my ideas; they aren't the boss of me.
Don't be so sure. Few doubt that genes are real, and I venture to say the notion of the selfish gene is now the accepted scientific view. But genes are really coded bits of information more than they are tangible things, and though they happen to be embodied in the physical substrate of DNA, their essence can also be conveyed symbolically. Memes are much the same, and their substrates can be as varied as a book or someone's memory. Granted, some memes (a chain letter, an urban legend) are trivial or short-lived. But think about the memeplex of organized religion, instances of which have endured for millennia and to which many devote their lives.
Memes arguably have shaped our biology. Some think the human brain has evolved a built-in faculty for language acquisition. Memeticists say language offered an advantage to our early ancestors because it can transmit memes: for instance, how to make a stone ax. Memes thus tipped the evolutionary balance in favor of individuals with language skills. Through this mechanism they may even be responsible for our big brains.
What do memes add to the conventional understanding of the propagation of culture? Just this: They remove the element of conscious choice, making the process purely mechanical. Just as natural selection accounts for mankind's origins without invoking God, meme theory accounts for our cultural edifices without positing a "self" or a "soul." That solves a long-standing philosophical conundrum: If we accept the idea of an unbreakable chain of cause and effect at the molecular level and take the materialist view that our brains are just complicated arrangements of molecules, there doesn't seem to be any room for free will. Susan Blackmore, in The Meme Machine (1999), argues that with memes there doesn't need to be. Free will and the sense of self are illusions. I'm not an independent actor, just an assemblage of memes (a "selfplex"). Things happen not because "I" make choices but because of interaction between the memes of which this "I" is composed. One objects: So how did you write your book, lady? Blackmore's response: Creative types don't create; they're merely vehicles by which evolving memes manifest themselves. ("The book wrote itself.") Sounds like the woolliest college bull session ever, I know, but even if you don't buy it you've still got to think: Whoa.
--CECIL ADAMS
It's not the medium that brings down tyrannies. It's the message.
Yes quickly. How long did it take to get rid of the bad idea of Feudalism? Movements take time to grow and you might notice that the places where they were successful were not the places where all of the reading was going on.
While you praise the short attention span you are actually praising the very thing that leads to groups like ELF and ALF which are doing and will do greater future harm. Their ideas are packaged in short sound bite that require no attention or thought. If they do not think about them then they are never questioned and become ingrained.
Because they never think their brilliant sound bite philosophies through and are not encouraged to do so by either their leaders and the medium in which the philosophy is presented and lack the attention span to listen to reasoned arguments against them they are a lot more dangerous and will result in far more damage then anything in the past. Prior generational philosophy were looking towards the future with man. This current one is looking toward a future with out humans.