I want to point out two things, if it's not a mood killer. In all fairness, he's speaking about it for America, and I'm not American so I suppose that doesn't really work out well.
First, I think it's rather disingenuous to broadly paint those issues as the same things. 50 years is really not a lot of time in history--it's frankly quite astounding to look at how much progress women's rights have made, for instance, since that period in time. That equal pay for women has remained on the table and to mention that obscures the fact we've made progress, in a way that does a disservice to the brave women who stood up for it.
Second, there seems to be this expectation that technological progress = progress co-implies new issues. I think that's really an assumption that shouldn't be made so easily. I know the writer intends it in more of a 'I'm sick of wrangling about the same old things even if they're important', but I'm not particularly a fan of this type of way of thinking about the issues that accompany new science and technology. There are in fact important issues accompanying the 2000s--it just seems awfully ironic that most people not in the field don't even seem to realise that these are live issues.
About the media as source of all social ills
Uh, yeah. That's where all those debates about what social networking is doing to us can be situated. It's not the same thing and we're bringing in new issues with the collapse of the public and the private in unprecedented ways. How do we think of privacy? Etc.
As I said, yeah sure, maybe it really holds in the American context. But the EU is really big about these.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2013-10-09 01:55 pm (UTC)First, I think it's rather disingenuous to broadly paint those issues as the same things. 50 years is really not a lot of time in history--it's frankly quite astounding to look at how much progress women's rights have made, for instance, since that period in time. That equal pay for women has remained on the table and to mention that obscures the fact we've made progress, in a way that does a disservice to the brave women who stood up for it.
Second, there seems to be this expectation that technological progress = progress co-implies new issues. I think that's really an assumption that shouldn't be made so easily. I know the writer intends it in more of a 'I'm sick of wrangling about the same old things even if they're important', but I'm not particularly a fan of this type of way of thinking about the issues that accompany new science and technology. There are in fact important issues accompanying the 2000s--it just seems awfully ironic that most people not in the field don't even seem to realise that these are live issues.
About the media as source of all social ills
Uh, yeah. That's where all those debates about what social networking is doing to us can be situated. It's not the same thing and we're bringing in new issues with the collapse of the public and the private in unprecedented ways. How do we think of privacy? Etc.
As I said, yeah sure, maybe it really holds in the American context. But the EU is really big about these.