In this section, Youngblood offers a rather accurate
description of conditioning of human behavior. One can be hard pressed to find
many habits influenced by a quirk of nature in today’s technologically driven
age. Children are more prone to learning things from a tablet computer or
television than they are from venturing forth from their homes. As a result, it is increasingly easy to
distinguish between people who, essentially, weren’t baptized by the media and
those that are intimate with technology. Generally, these patterns become
prevalent as media trends become viral. For example, entire legions of people
have enjoyed, reflected upon, and appreciate popular shows, such as “Breaking
Bad.” These subcultures are easily observable through social network
interactions and the overall prevalence it has in conversations. Of course, this
formation of a culture is a result of our man-made media environment.
As it
was stated in class, I believe it is important to take a step back from this
technology-abundant environment to change our perspective on things, if only
for a while. With such a paradigm shift, it would be possible to contemplate
alternative actions and ways of thinking that would otherwise be inconvenient,
if not impossible to do in our high-speed, native environments. As Youngblood
states, man “not only participates but actually recreates
his environment both physical and metaphysical,” With this in mind, it is
imperative that we become conscious of our environment, so that one day we can take
the torch and recreate our world in an image we find desirable, not just
derivative. If self-reflection were to not take place, we would be limited in
our ability to produce anything unique. This might just happen to explain why
history keeps repeating itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment