The AI-generated image above is intended to represent an analogy which is well-known but worth another airing. If we imagine ourselves draining a large, stagnant urban pond, we might expect to see all kinds of junk emerge as the water level subsides. Old tyres, rusty bikes and other junk nobody wants.
Assuming they are still with us, all adults over 40 have seen the internet evolve over the past 20 years and this gives us the pond analogy. The horrible junk was always there below the smooth surface of public life, but now it is becoming more visible.
Our digital world may be one reason why there appears to be more and more absurdity in social and political life. Why governments seem to be increasingly incompetent, celebrity culture increasingly banal and absurd. Why absurdity has become as visible as those tyres, rusty bikes and other junk emerging from the urban pond.
Suppose everything always was this absurd or even worse. Suppose the internet has made alternative viewpoints so much more available that the disgusting urban pond really is being drained in spite of powerful interests trying to fill it up again.
It didn’t begin 20 years ago of course, but an enhanced ability to check media stories plus political and official narratives must have changed something, at least for those who take advantage of it. An enhanced tendency to see political and official narratives as narratives rather than sources of veracity must have changed something.
The drained urban pond is no more than an analogy for something we can’t easily demonstrate. Yet it is still easy enough for millions of adults to recall what the internet offers compared to what was was on offer a few decades ago.
Suppose everything always was this absurd or even worse. Suppose the internet has made alternative viewpoints so much more available that the disgusting urban pond really is being drained in spite of powerful interests trying to fill it up again.
It didn’t begin 20 years ago of course, but an enhanced ability to check media stories plus political and official narratives must have changed something, at least for those who take advantage of it. An enhanced tendency to see political and official narratives as narratives rather than sources of veracity must have changed something.
The drained urban pond is no more than an analogy for something we can’t easily demonstrate. Yet it is still easy enough for millions of adults to recall what the internet offers compared to what was was on offer a few decades ago.
7 comments:
"All hands to the pumps!"
"Batten down the hatches"
Sam - drain the swamp and hold your nose.
Teddy - and don't let the water back in.
A lowering tide grounds all boats perhaps.
Tammly - and we see what's underneath.
Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.
Not entirely, so I believe.
The radio and tv humour of my youth is still funny.
The music - pop, folk, country, jazz, classic, whatever, still stirs the blood. The artists played because they enjoyed it.
The books, comics, poetry, essays etc. still enthrall.
A lot of politicians were honest and not avaricious.
My teachers - well most of them -honestly wanted to impart a love of literature, the sciences and maths - even Latin! They wanted to expand the horizons of pupils living in a Scottish backwater, in homes with no electricity, mains water, gas, and a toilet which was a bucket in a dunny out the back. And unbeknownst to them they succeeded. God Bless them.
Doonhamer - "My teachers - well most of them -honestly wanted to impart..."
Yes mine were mostly like that too and they did succeed although I never went back to tell them. Politicians, the establishment, newspapers and pundits not so much though, and not nearly as keen on our welfare as we might have supposed.
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