Three things:
(1) Did you, like most people, miss the movie Idiocracy* last year? It looks like yet another lame comedy, but bear with it. It actually isn’t, really. It is one of the best indictments of what seems to be happening to a large part of the core of our society that I’ve seen in a while. You know what I mean… lower and lower thresholds for waiving all sorts of basic things that were once part of our required education… not just the awful spellings on signs that some of us whine about (sometimes too much, I’ll admit), but the necessity to use a severely reduced vocabulary to make yourself understood in the local store…or the lack of patience people (and the media) have for a reasoned, structured argument, focusing rather on looks, personalities or sound-bites (look for example at some the political headline discussions in both US and UK news at this moment)… the worry that fewer and fewer people seem to read a book from time to time**… The fact that nobody who works in stores seems to know anything about the merchandise they are employed to sell you… Or that situation you’ve had where the person behind the counter gets confused and can’t serve you because the item that you want to buy does not have a little picture of it at the checkout that they can click on in order to ring up your order/total…
Well, this film imagines a future where that sort of thing has become the least of your worries. The “dumbing-down” has just continued unabated. Everybody is essentially brainwashed by large corporations to use their products without question, since nobody is educated well enough to know to object – water is not drunk anymore, for example: A company sells you this Gatorade-like product instead. It is supposed to be better for you. Water is only used in toilets. Your state-assigned legal defense lawyer got his law degree from the local Cosco, the national television news broadcasts have become entertainment (oh, wait…. that’s already happened). There’s an excellent Wikipedia article on it. Don’t read it if you want to see the film first.
The only issue I really have with the film is that this is supposed to be 500 years in the future. Really? Sometimes I’d say it is more like 50 years, and we’d be there. It seems that the studios that initially supported it tried to bury it once they saw what they had. Fox, for example, is one of the agencies in our society that rather fuels the engine of the locomotive that we sometimes seem to be riding on towards a shockingly under-educated and anti-intellectual society. You should see the film’s version of a Fox News broadcast. On the one hand, you laugh at it, and on the other, you are horrified since the parody is really not very far from how it seems now, those rare times that I land on that channel. No wonder Fox put little into the marketing of the film. If looking for something surprisingly sharp and perhaps not what you might normally get for your night of film viewing…. get Idiocracy.
(2) Ok, so you think I’m exaggerating, since you’ve forgotten just how bad things can get. Let me remind you! I was in the car of a friend and colleague, the other day, driving to a meeting across town. She had an object on the dashboard that I’d not seen before. Turned out that it was a traffic radar detector. (Wow, apparently she gets a lot of use for it… but that’s another story.) We’d previously talked about Idiocracy before, and so she was delighted to reach over and show me the instructions for the detector. (She’d just got the new unit and so still had the instructions.) Overall it starts out fine, explaining about magnetic fields and so forth, but later it gets hilarious. I mean, really hilarious. It is at the right – you can click for a larger view. Please read!! Here is a close up of the key funny bit about driving in circles:
(3) Ok. To end, and on the same subject really, let me recommend the February 13th 2008 talk in the Zócalo LA series of public square lectures. It is Dana Gioia, and the talk is “Why the Arts Matter”. Here’s the synopsis:
Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, visits Zócalo to discuss the impoverishment of American popular culture and “the need to reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public.” He argues that the real purpose of arts education isn’t to produce more artists but to “create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.” Something happens, he says, when an individual actively engages in the arts—be it reading a novel at home, attending a concert at a local church, or seeing a dance company perform at a college campus—that awakens both a heightened sense of identity and civic awareness. He warns that America’s cultural decline has “huge and alarming economic consequences.”
I heard it (I tend to listen on the Sunday night KPCC broadcasts while cooking). I recommend it. While you’re on their website choosing between getting the podcast or the direct stream, have a look at several of the other lectures that are there for listening. It is just a wonderful collection. You can also attend some of those events live if you keep an eye out for them. Explore the site. Enjoy!
-cvj
*Thanks A, M, and M.
**Or, for that matter, blog posts more than a paragraph long – you know who you are!
That movie was painful to watch and you’re right, it looks more like 50 years (maybe even 25) into the future, not 500. It was an excellent companion piece to The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby.
Just to follow up. The Post entry was called “Hot Library Smut.”
And you then point to Shifting Baselines.
Quote from Scienceblogs,”Shifting Literature by Jennifer L. Jacquet?
Ursula Le Guin
In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it–everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.
So we lost something in the technological exchange, and thusly, accounts for the decline?
Hmmmm…..maybe the instructions weren’t meant to be read?:)
On/Off
Anyway, I was thinking of a comparison movie that I saw a long time ago. I knew it was about “book burning.” So of course, I googled and wiki’d it.
Symbol of the “New York Society for the Suppression of Vice”, advocating book-burning.
So here’s a possible scene unfolding, not having seen the film mentioned.
An incident in the New Plot of, “The Cultural Decline.”
This is the “police badge” above, used by the peace officers for the “over achievers” who secretly read books.
No one, reads books anymore.
It’s one of those regretful actions. That by mistake, Johnny burns a rare copy of a book unknowingly trying to prove his point?
———————–
But more to your point about peering into the movie itself?
The medium is the message by Marshall Luhan
McLuhan also claimed in Understanding Media that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be “hot”, intensifying one single sense “high definition”, demanding a viewer’s attention, and a comic book to be “cool” and “low definition”, requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.[4] This concentration on the medium itself, and how it conveys information — rather than on the specific content of the information — is the focal point of “the medium is the message”.
New medium, new ways to think about cultural decline. Bee certainly thinks about it a lot. I couldn’t help remember the library’s and pictures you had in a post previous.
Will have to watch for it.
I’m adding Idiocracy to my Netflix queue right now. Thanks for the tip.
Well as a counterpoint, the world literacy rate has steadily increased throughout the 20th century, and there is the everpresent Flinn effect for IQ.
Its also a psychological fact, that most people tend to see the world around them as somehow lesser than it used to be. A nostalgia of sorts that has a tendency to make anecdotal reports problematic.
I feel the same way frankly, but then many of the numbers don’t really seem to back the impression up.
The latter part of what you’re saying is what I’m getting at.
> Now, a majority of people seem to *choose* ignorance and take pride > in it. I agree with that.
And the weight of the culture, and its various powerful means of dissemination, is such that it seems to be getting harder to choose otherwise for many.
Cheers,
-cvj
My reference to history comes from thinking about my own particular ancestors, one of whom was pulled out of school at the age of 9 to become a coal miner because, as his dad put it, he could read and write. I think of myself and what I would have become without universal free public education–just a wife? Or a boy I knew in Mexico back in the 1960s who brought a high school to his town because he could not afford to move the 40 miles to the nearest high school. His dad had died and he was the main support for a flock of brothers and sisters who were younger, but he still fought for his education. For most of history, ignorance has reigned and most people have lacked the opportunity or desire to change that. Now, a majority of people seem to *choose* ignorance and take pride in it. I agree with that. As a parent, though, I sometimes think it is the choice of the parents to keep their children ignorant. But I don’t suppose I have time to explain that, so it will remain an unsubstantiated statement.
No it was not the best example of everything in this category… but there are some key things, such as their need to tell the driver to look out for other traffic, tell them that a parking lot is the best place, and generally over-explain things so that people cannot blame or sue the writer of the instructions for anything utterly silly that they might do.
Allied to the degeneration into a culture where people are not encouraged to think for themselves is the fear that when people end up doing silly things as a result of their own not-thinking, they will blame/sue.
-cvj
I thought the “circle driving” instructions were not a good example. If I tell someone to “drive their car in a circle twice”, they could waste time trying to find a circle to drive it on. “Circle” is a geometric ideal that doesn’t express the desired activity very well.
By the way, one thing the instructions didn’t specify is if you had to keep your direction vector steadily rotating in the same direction. What happens if instead of making 4 right hand turns you make 3 right hand turns, 1 left hand turn, and then 2 right hand turns?
It’s the neanderthal genes coming to the front.
Hi Jude,
It is little to do with intelligence, and everything to do with education, and the value placed on it by society at a given time, vs other things. I am quite sure that I am no more intelligent than that person in the store who, annoyingly, knows nothing about their merchandise. It is just that it is not seen as important any more for them to learn about it – nor to take pride in knowing.
I read a lot of history, and so am mostly on the fence about how much we’ve changed for many things… nevertheless changes do happen, even if cyclic. I do think that anti-intellectualism dominates (or threatens to dominate) the culture more than it ever did in recent times. Especially if it serves the political ends of the people in control of very large power bases.
There are probably pocket examples of this in the past here and there, but I don’t think it was always like this. It is tied to the greater immediacy and reach that mass media has as compared to before. That is largely new (as a matter of both scale and penetration), and so new phenomena can appear that had not been present before.
Also, I think that the stakes are very high here. An anti-intellectual culture affected the election of a knowledge-suppressing government of the most powerful country on the planet, for example.
Cheers,
-cvj
It seems that the person who wrote the circle instructions was just bored.
I don’t know if people are really getting stupider or not–it seems to me that being intelligent has always been a minority position. Weren’t you ever ridiculed for being the smart kid? Or even told that you’re smart when you feel average, and then figuring out that you really are smarter than most people, and considering how much you know that you don’t know….well, anyway, thanks for the film recommendation. I added it to Netflix.
If you read history, it can make you feel better about the present–not much better, but a little better.
Without giving away too much of the movie, it is worth noting that the (movie) public’s anti-intellectualism is interesting. When the main character uses a wide vocabulary he is ridiculed. Eventually, it is the government that advertises him as an intelligent person who can help their situation. Back to reality, notice how the presidential candidates spend more time parading their famous endorsers than they do advertising the experts they would like to make part of their Cabinet.