[ExI] fun essay by penn jillette

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Dave Sill
.

 

Isaac's generation will mostly grow up completely unaware of television.
It's dead, Jim.

 

 It's still a good source of content. Youtube is great, but it can't
currently fund a production like "Game of Thrones".-Dave

 

 

Ja, but I see the lack of controllability as an inherent show stopper for
the post y2k generation.  They just will not relate to it, very much
analogous to how you and I never took up with radio dramas.  The advanced
online gaming community provides plenty of content, with user input.  TV
suffers from ignoring user input.  I saw three good examples with my son,
age five, and his two cousins aged six and eight.  They watched for a few
minutes, but when the first commercial series came on, all three wandered
off and did not return.  The advertising industry must see the handwriting
on the wall here, and stop bothering to design advertisement for teens and
eventually for young adults.  They have left the building.

 

Here's something to explore however.  With the explosion of media sources,
we would no longer have universal cultural icons.  Find any American over
45, and they will all know exactly what you mean when you use the terms
Gilligan, Skipper, Mary Ann for instance.  We all knew who the Beatles were,
and Fleetwood Mac.  Now I noticed my son and his cousins all have separate
cultural icons, because there are so many of them.  We have now radio, MTV
and all its equivalents, the online gaming community, broadcast TV,
somewhere hidden in the mess is all the real world heroes such as the
scientific community for the geek crowd, traditional literature and the
writer community in general, Second Life and all its spawn, the sports world
with waaay more sports available now than there once was, plus a bunch of
others you hipsters know about that came along when I was completely
distracted by career and family responsibilities.  Television was once about
half of our consciousness.  Now it is perhaps 10% and shrinking rapidly.  We
may find we have no common characters as ever more media compete for
attention.  

 

spike

 

 

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