Re: Off-Guardian on the importance of social media Archived Message
Posted by margo on June 24, 2019, 4:03 pm, in reply to "Re: Off-Guardian on the importance of social media"
You misunderstand my post. I'm not talking about teenagers sending social pictures of cats. I think you know that Social media are to current society what the invention of the press or the telephone were to society in previous centuries. Corporate capture aside, these instant messaging inventions are simply telegraph/telegram super-upgrades, with global public readability function. Some say these chat-function platforms should be decoupled from a tiny number of profiting conglomerates and offered as public utility services, in a neutral way, like landline telephones. Everyone's free to do what they want, of course. Those who prefer to improve themselves by cancelling the newspaper and leaving the phone off the hook, are free to do so. In your case, it seems you've done this - bar leaving one social medium open: 'The Lifeboat'. Some people want no outside communication and prefer to sit alone with substantive literature for religious reasons, but it bears remembering that folks like Jesus didn't stay home in contemplative silence: they tended to go for public group communication. I have a funny feeling that the peripatetic and chatty Jesus would have tweeted his gospels and memes and taken the opportunity to bypass the Roman rags and speak directly to his people via Whatsapp and FaceBook, if only communication media had got beyond papyrus, at that stage There's an argument that people in democracies have a responsibility to inform themselves and participate. At any rate, this has been the message - and the value - put out by western civilisation. The medium isn't the poison. The medium is neutral.
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