This week's official buzz is that HD is officially OUT. Blu-Ray is IN. And no, according to the experts, you cannot play Blu-Ray on HD-DVD players. This apparently bothers no one--no one who can do anything about it, anyway.
And so I guess we all now have to trudge out and buy new thingies to play our movies on. And all those unusable DVD players will go.....into massive landfills?
Also in the news: apparently people have suddenly become convinced AGAIN that we Americans are dumber than we used to be. This old news story keeps getting rehashed, but that's fine by me, since the topic fits in handily with this week's reading: Neil Postman's "The Huxleyan Principle," in which he argues that the real problem is not that we're stupider, but that, due to a pervasively technological form of media, we process information in profoundly different ways.
Now heck, I know I'm a lot dumber than I used to be (this is called BEING A PARENT), but I don't think that's what these pundits have in mind. They're talking about a vague sense of generational dumbness: i.e. "these young people today are just so much dumber than I ever was." I love how Ms. Jacoby uses herself as an example of "not dumb" (as in, "I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens, but.....").
As an example of how very far we HAVE come, I offer up this lovely funny page that also appeared on Digg today, about all our past drunk presidents. Just something to keep in mind: one of our politicians could never get away with this stuff these days.
Not that I'm saying that's an improvement, mind you. It's just to say that people were doing all the same dumb stuff in the past that they're doing now. Very little changes when it comes to human nature or human dumbness. What does change is simply the new and improved ways we find in which to express our natural inclination toward stupidity.
p.s. What's that little number up there on the left side of my Blog title? I just noticed it.....
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The number is the name or id code of the layout you are using. I am not sure, but I suspect that it could, with a bit of putzing, be removed...
As far as the Blu-Ray stuff is concerned, just buy yourself a nice PS3! Plays DVDs, Blu-Ray and games, works as a browser and online communications device, and is cheaper than replacing everything. :)
I just talked with Prof. Farber about the idea that people are not necessarily getting stupider, but simply that we are in a transition period where the way we have evolved to learn and use information is changing to something new. I will have to show him this article!
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