@jabel It has nothing to do with holy wars and everything to do with biology and technology. (Disclaimer: I have not even read everything in this conversion, I only saw this comment in the feed.) Just out a curiosity, have you ever read Neil Postman? He seems like someone you would particularly enjoy and appreciate. Particularly his Amusing Ourselves To Death is one of the most accessible and significant books on television as a medium of communication—and the whole McLuhan clan. Postman: “What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch.”
He may address the time question, but I don’t recall. There were predictions as early as the 40s or 50s that humans would only have to work 3-4 days a week because…technology. I think they’ve seen that those predictions were technically correct, it’s just that we don’t notice it. No one, for instance, says, “Well, since I can save 8 hours by driving to town via internal combustion instead of harnessing the horse and buggy, I can spend that extra time meditating or reading about stoicism.” The question of the 24-hr news cycle is not really one of philosophy or technology, per se, but more deeply epistemical, subconscious, subtle.
Postman again: “I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter. Their warnings have customarily been directed against those consciously formulated ideologies that appeal to the worst tendencies in human nature. But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology. No Mein Kampf or Communist Manifesto announced its coming. It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance. Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology. This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past eighty years.”
That was his thought in… 1985!!!