What Effect Is More Forms of Communication Having on Our Culture?

Great Debates
1

I once read something interesting about the death of George Washington (1732-99). I guess the doctor is probably the first person who learned of his death. Then he probably left the room and informed the immediate family. Then, this article went on to say, the world slowly learned of Washington’s death. The immediate city was probably the first, followed slowly by the rest of the country. But most interesting (according to this article, again) is that it literally took months, if not years for some people to learn of the general’s death. It certainly took about a month to travel from the U.S. to Great Britain. Then you have to consider the time it took to go to all the isolated areas of the country and globe.

Nowadays we just take it for granted communication of this kind would be instant. But the thing that is relatively recent is the ease of communication we have with each other. We can call people from our cell phone no matter where we are. And emails have enabled us to communicate cheaply and easily with virtually anyone we want to anywhere. Even ten years ago, that wasn’t possible (or at least commonplace).

What effect is this new speed and ease of communication having on our culture? Is it a good effect? Bad? Or for that matter, is it even having any effect at all?

I look forward to hearing people’s opinion on this. Also, if anyone knows of any article that discusses this, a link would be appreciated.

:slight_smile:

2

Personally, I would say that communication IS (or at least a very large portion of) our culture. Just look at what were doing now, communicating with people over the internet, for fun. Our lives are centered our communication.

(Really great topic by the way :slight_smile: )

3

I think one disadvantage of modern communication is the trend towards being able to reach anyone, anywhere at any time. Once cell phones are all equipped with GPS (you know its happening), people will be unable to get privacy or to fabricate where they are at the moment. “What do you mean you’re at the store? It says here that you’re at the strip joint!” etc.

There might even come a time when police will go over cell phone logs to pinpoint where you were at the scene of a crime. Even if you’ve never made a call or received one.

Just speculation of course. Feel free to disagree.

4

I think that the effect of high-tech information overload in western culture is bad. Very bad. Our poor senses are plummeted with discontinuous information for the most part of our at-wake day. This ceaseless bombardment is not of our own choosing, it is imposed upon us by our own culture, leaving us little or no time to assimilate the information we recieve properly or even any time to reflect upon the value of the information that we indiscriminately input. This indiscriminate process of social programing can lead to a sick nation of mindless automatons, knee-jerk robots that respond to the world with cultural cliches, rather than think.

Have you talked to anyone under thirty lately?

5

Modern communications are a very good thing, but they are only as good as the use we make of them. They allow us to share our ideas in ways that simply weren’t possible until very recentely.

We don’t learn much by talking to people with similar opinions to our own. Modern communications give us much more scope to talk to people from different countries, and with different backgrounds to ourselves.

6

I would agree with raizok… communication does have good aspects, but ultimately will progress towards lack of privacy.

Also, increased communication encourages too much dependence. I notice that people seem to be getting less and less comfortable with being alone at any given time. Especially within my generation (college-age), most people wouldn’t dream of, say, taking a walk to go somewhere by themselves.

We’ve all been affected by the constant availability of communication-- email, cell phones, instant messaging-- that to be without it is unthinkable. It’s my opinion that this aversion to solitude is a very bad thing; sometimes it’s just better to get away from everyone else, to let you mind wander where it will.

7

I absolutly agree rose. Call me sometime and we’ll not talk. :slight_smile:

8

Does anyone write letters anymore? I rarely get the chance to write a letter, but I always love to do it becuase it has such a nostalgic, novelty quality about it. Writing a letter forces you to collect your thoughts in an amusing, lucid, economical way. I have no doubt morons hate writing letters because it makes them think a little. It forces you to be intimate, literate…a well written letter from anyone will make you regard them differently than if they just called instead.

Things like that annoy me. I think the extreme ease and economy which we can communicate with so many people so easily has severely devalued the joy of well-written correspondance. I think good message boards like this one have captured some of that, but certainly not all of it.

Time ago it would be a great treat to recieve a letter from someone you hadn't spoken to in a while. Now you call them on the phone and it's no big deal.

There is good and bad to mass, global communication-but i think it’s still evolving so who knows where it will go.

9

Some good points, but I think you are being far too negative.

The mass of communication mediums also means a mass of drivel (TV shedules to fill, newspaper columns to write). But don’t shoot the medium. Compared to 200 years ago, we are still vastly better informed about the world around us.

For example, consider the effect of modern communications on science. 200 years ago the process of disseminating and peer review of new theories could take years or decades. Now it can happen in days.

10

What people forget is that you can always turn them off.

“social programming” is largely a meaningless term. Programmed to do what? By whom?

Oh sweet irony :dubious:

Kids these days are diferent from my generation and older in the sense that they are actually growing up with cell phones, Internet, email, IM and so on. We didn’t have these things in any real sense until after I graduated college.

I think the effect is a greater connection to the world at large, but a more superficial one. I can spend my time IMing someone in China but I barely speak to my next door neighbor.

11

Sure. That’s what e-mail is for. Same thing, only delivery is quicker.

12

Not quite the same. Email is more convenient than writing a letter, so people tend to take less care over them than a letter. Of course, an email can be as well written as a letter, but usually they aren’t.

13

Just think what is was like to be born into a world that had party lines,or no phone other than one in the hall/corner store, to communicate with.

15 min.news spots on evening radio.

In small towns you had the cracker barrel,cities the corner store/stoop/park/bar to exchange info with on a daily basis with real live people.
Kids older?I think it’s the reverse.They tend to communicate with their peers only through their Ims,seem to hang on to juvenile behaviors for a longer time.

I actually looked up to the elders in my neighborhood that imparted some wordly wisdom and experiences to those news stories.And kept those communication lines open as we both grew older.Looked up one or two of them when I came back for visits to the old neighborhood just to tell them how their words/style had helped me thru my travels further afoot.

Today they may thru the internet but I’m betting if those written words were uttered in public by people their parents age or older,they’d be largely ignored.

I think you nailed it in the superficial line.That is not a good thing.Creates even more social divides we never attempt to cross.IMO.

14

** This indiscriminate process of social programming can lead to a sick nation of mindless automatons, knee-jerk robots that respond to the world with cultural cliches, rather than independent thought. ~ Milum**

What? You have declared “social programing” to be a largely meaningless term? Think, msmith537! The social programming I referred to is created by the ignorance of our own Culture, and our Culture obeys only input and it knows not well what its programming will do.

But I know… What was once known as msmith will then be forever after known as 537.
That’s what social programming will do. :slight_smile:

15

It strikes me, at least, that often I will hear people musing over the speed of modern communications. I refer to something along the lines of, “Wow. Can you imagine how this image can be sent through a wire to someplace half-way across the world?”

Yet, at the same time, it seems that that has become the key. The ‘Wow’ factor. Wow, I can find out about something in Turkey that happened two hours ago. Wow, I can email people across the world. Etc.

I think this wow factor has replaced content.

As a result of this, almost, not to hijack, it would strike me as the most effective form of communication today is likely the advertisement. The least are the most time consuming (reading, letter-writing, etc.). These, as noted require effort.

I think, perhaps, the mistake that is being made by some is the substitution of modern, mass communication with that of personal communication. Everyone is familiar with the now infamous student line, “Why should I read the book when I can watch the movie?” The movie is designed for the masses, designed, oftentimes, to please a larger group. The book can be far more personal.

As always, however, it is not the fault of the technology. It has only given us faster, better methods of being lazy. It is a tool, like any other. An instant messaging conference can be as personal as a face-to-face meeting, if the speakers chose to make it so. The problem, it seems, is that they don’t.

16

MSmith:

Yes, we can always turn off our cell phones so that we won’t hear it ring. That doesn’t mean that others (government, law enforcement, the legal system and the like) won’t be able to track us down via our cell phones. It’s a computer chip that can’t be turned off unless you opin its guts and know how to disconnect from the system. I saw a report where they are now putting GPS (Global Positioning Satilite) in cars. That is all for the Government to keep an eye on YOU and where YOU have been.

I saw that someone broght up my thought about “global communication”. We don’t talk to our neighbors but we talk to someone millions of miles/diloveters from us.

Is global communication good? NO! And yet i still choose to use it. Go figure! tlsmall

17

Speaking as one of the younger generation who grew up around computers and, at a young age, the Internet, my opinion is that both are neither good nor bad. They simply are a great potential to be used for healthy or not-so-healthy purposes. For example, I use the internet daily to plumb deep into areas of interest that I might otherwise not be able to delve nearly as far into. This is a good thing. The bad thing? Without my computer and its links, my memory for details decline exponentially. I’ve become dependent on the instant re-checking of facts available on the 'net. It’s a trade-off, a balance, of good and bad habits for me.

In short, society is changing in revolutionary ways which we’re finding impossible to anticipate or predict. The facts are that 1) we can’t stop these changes and 2) they will most likely be moulding people generations down the line. This, ladies and gentlemen, has no accurate historical equivalent. Even the printing press falls short of its power and scope to shift the world. Revolutions are born of words, and the Net has more words than we can ever encompass in our minds.

What effect is instant communication and information access having on our culture? It’s destroying our culture. It’s building our culture. The only thing we can predict is the unpredictable and the only thing we can do is choose our battles to preserve what can or must be, because the wave is unstoppable. Luddites can destroy for a time, but they can not turn this back short of true Armageddon.

18

Inherently, there’s a problem then - what ‘can or must be’? And, who judges that?

Yet, I do not truly believe in revolutions, per se. I tend to see things as a continuity. Modern communication is a huge extension of the concepts that came into being, as a result of the printing press and other communication developments. It clearly was manifested through the telegraph and from then on. It is partly the Wow factor that allows this. In fact, it is mostly the result of these new forms of communication that events in one country are important to people across the globe. They would not matter without the development of communication, since varied places would not have the connections required for such attention.

19

Everybody. That’s why there’s such a struggle during these moments, from those who embrace the changes whole-heartedly and without any reserve to those who would attempt to halt them. Those in-between squabble about what’s important to keep and what’s expendable.

Everything is a continuum, yes, just like the printing press didn’t appear as a deus ex machina, but there come certain times when one can look back and realize clearly the world as it was 30 years before is no more. Call them revolutions, call them watershed moments, but it’s the point where grey-white begins shifting to grey-black even if we may not completely realize it yet. It’s an important moment, an unstable moment in time when you’re balancing on a fulcrum between “old” and “new”. The way we used to operate is breaking down under the stress of gradual (or rapid) advancement, yet we do not put our full faith in systems perhaps better-suited to the task (or perhaps not). Sometimes bits quietly recalibrate themselves in a gentle revolution to circumstances over time… and sometimes the system is so rigid that it simply shatters. Look at what’s happening in Iran and China, for example. Students and young professionals, those with access to the outside world through the various forms of international communication, are running up against rigid systems that may (China) or may not (Iran) be able to cope with the change.

20

I think we’re on the same page, and just not quite expressing things in the say way.

Perhaps, I am just more skeptical of the preservation of culture, in face of the desire to not be involved in the deeper levels. However, we obviously agree that changes are occuring as these modern forms of communication.

Yet, I think there are so many changes we can list. By the very fact we are writing this on a forum instead of other media is a demonstration of that fact. So, maybe, it is not what effects, as much, but how to maximize the good, that will become critical to our society.