Ours is an age besotted with graphic entertainments. And in an increasingly infantilized society, whose moral philosophy is reducible to a celebration of “choice,” adults are decreasingly distinguishable from children in their absorption in entertainments and the kinds of entertainments they are absorbed in – video games, computer games, hand-held games, movies on their computers and so on. This is progress: more sophisticated delivery of stupidity. -- George Will –
Have a great Monday!
I do not share George Will's pessimistic view. Thank heaven, I know enough young people who study and work hard, and manage to have fun, even if it is a computer game every now and then. When Gutenberg started printing books, the George Wills of the time were worried about the conseqences of the common man having access to books.
ReplyDeleteThe only proviso I would add to your comment, Merisi, is with regard to your use of the term "every now and then."
ReplyDeleteSee... "every now and then" is not so much the issue being discussed here.
There are people who play nineteen hours of any twenty-four, in front of video games, and their "studying" becomes the "every now and then" part of their lives, and they are lucky if they spend 10 minutes a day concentrating on anything other than pseudo-killing aliens or other human beings on one screen or another.
There is nothing more addictive than intellectual laziness. And nothing more seductive, in this regard, than the substitution of visual-reality, in one form or another.