What Time Is It - AROUND THE WORLD

admin · Site Admin Joined: 23 Dec 2005 Posts: 78

http://literarydiscussions.zaphod.myfreeforum.org/ftopic904.php

For centuries, prior to 1940's, when penicillin was invented,
individuals would die from various infections, or illnesses, sometimes
at an early age, BUT the entire race, the species, was very strong,
hardy, durable, resilient, precisely because any weakness or infirmity
died off at an early age, or even in infancy, hence the survivors and
their children were very resistant to disease.... BUT...

In past 100 years,... medicine and surgery has allowed even the
weakest and sickliest, to survive to adulthood and to have children....
THEREFORE, the individual is now better off, BUT the human species
becomes weaker as a group, more dependent on antibiotics and
surgery to survive...

The weaker modern species of man, in highly civilized societies, can
no longer take a drink from a stream, without getting a disease, but
must have water from bottles, especially purified...

Think how healthy the native American Indian was, in the wild, for
centuries, before the European came, with no medicine or health care
or surgery...

NOW,.... carry the analogy across, to the IMAGINATION’s and minds of
previous centuries, who did not have audiovisual, and video games,
and cell phones,... and internet, bombarding them, with amusement,
or what to think

When i was a child, there were no google search
engines, or internet,.... and a school homework assignment, in history
for example, would send us to the library, to search the card catalog,
and the encyclopedias, and the indexes of many books...
in order to anwer the questions of the assignment..

In 8th grade,... I spent a weekend trying to find information about "The
Concordat of Worms,Germany"...

Today, a child simply does google search, and then, cuts and pastes
information...

We see the mind become more passive, lazy, less motivated to dig
and search....

This is not true of everyone, of course, but certainly is true of many.

Technology and medicine may weaken us in one respect, but
strengthen us in another...

When firearms and guns were invented, one person commented "the
rifle has made every tailor into a warrior"

A movie was made of the life of Malcom X, our civil rights leader, and I
think in that movie, it said "When the European came to Africa, the
white man had the Bible and the black man had the land, and when
the black man left Africa, the black man had the Bible and the white
man had the land." This saying was very powerful in the media,
catching the attention of the public audiences.

So... here is an example of audiovisual media working in a positive
manner with regard to social injustice

A knife in the hands of a skilled surgeon does great good, but in the
hands of a bad surgeon, or a criminal, it does much harm

Any tool may be used either as an instrument of good or evil

There is a book in the USA which documents the portrayal and
depiction of blacks during the 19th and 20th century...

In the 19th century, blacks were portrayed in drawings and posters in
a very negative fashion,.... portrayed as clowns, or rascals, or very
simple

But, you see, since the civil rights movies of the 1960s, gradually
blacks entered into the media portraying doctors, lawyers, judges and
politicians...

So you see, now, media teaches the general public to see the charm
and beauty of Woopie Goldberg , for example, or the wisdom of Oprah
Winfree, or the authority of Condoleezza Rice

So.... the image and perception of blacks, and also of women in
general, is benefited by the changes in the use of audiovisual media
tools

But, of course, media and audiovisual was used by the Nazis in

Germany to portray the Jew as socially undesirable, evil, etc

Nowadays, the plots of our television and movie dramas echo and
explore the current events...

One sees, for example, nowadays, many stories and fictional dramas
now involving Arab terrorists...

BBC in britain produced a television drama about a "dirty bomb"
exploding in England....

At the end of the movie, they catch an Arab terrorist who is
responsible... and he says some chilling words.... cant remember
exactly... but something like "it is the fear/terror which UNITES us
Muslims and divides YOU non-muslims"

So, we see how media can set a "spin" upon our understanding of
current events and world events, by concentrating on dramatizations
of certain themes