"I think this is a universal principle: the rate of a life form's biological development is out of key with the rate of technological development. In a hundred years, we've advanced enormously in terms of technology, but we're essentially the same fearful, passionate, mistake-ridden, aggressive, greedy, ego-driven creature. And there is nothing materially different in recorded history going right back to the Greeks. We are governed by the same kind of incoherent tribulatons today as we were then. We really haven't progressed."
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Johnny Byrne Thought of the Day #4:
award-winning creator of Enter The House Between and author of 32 books including Horror Films FAQ (2013), Horror Films of the 1990s (2011), Horror Films of the 1980s (2007), TV Year (2007), The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia (2007), Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair (2006),, Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company (2004), The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi (2004), An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith (2002), The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film & Television (2004), Exploring Space:1999 (1997), An Analytical Guide to TV's Battlestar Galactica (1998), Terror Television (2001), Space:1999 - The Forsaken (2003) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002).
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I completely agree, and offer a supporting quote: "Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
ReplyDeleteYou should check out Neil Postman’s “Technopoly.” In it he classifies technological evolution into three distinct stages. 1) Tool using cultures, where early human cultures invented tools for two primary reasons: to address the problems of physical life, (e.g. windmills, plows etc.) and to serve the symbolic world of art, politics, and religion. 2) technocracies, which describe cultures in which tools play a central role in altering consciousness by essentially attacking the culture; and as a consequence, tradition, social mores, myths, politics, rituals, and religion had to fight for their lives, and then finally 3) Technopolies, or a totalitarian technocracy, or what I like to call the Matrix, where technology becomes the omnipresent dominant ideology.
ReplyDeleteIn the social sciences, computer technology has rapidly increased our reliance on statistically driven quantitative analysis which in turn influences policy in every institution of the modern world. When all culture is quantified through polling in politics, IQ or standardized testing in education, or a quantifiable rating system in terms of gross sales in the music industry or number of viewers when it comes to renewing a TV show, then those subjective qualities that may give birth to art and magic are lost and culture is diminished.
-rc