Diligence and the applications of traditional knowledge values could also correct those errors, though, so we have to be careful how we play with the idea of progress and advantage.
We seem too be losing the ability to make high quality demands on our information providers and if we were the response would be that the crowd corrects these errors and produces a better long term product. Diligence and the applications of traditional knowledge values could also correct those errors, though, so we have to be careful how we attribute the idea of progress and advantage.
What we know and how we know it, the checks and balances on authority, are all changing.
Summary and conclusions.
Significant changes in communications change how we think and what we know. Historically our memory needs (both individual and social), our creativity, and our approach to knowledge have interacted in ways that produced the loose canon or art, knowledge and culture that made up our view of civilisation.
Keepers of the cannon, the media, pulled off a brilliant balancing act to fund these cerebral activities, and disseminate their results, while keeping our economies ticking over at modest rates of growth.
Today’s situation is less clear. The role of a unified set of “media” enterprises is definitely undermined by the proliferation of media types. Where there were four main types of media there are now thirty four. We don’t yet know what that diversification means for the economic roles media play and what, in the long term, the economic paymaster will fund and support.
Meantime the purposeful social roles played by memory, creativity and knowledge seem to be in retreat. Drama and art seem to be actively migrating from their traditional social and political purposes.
In their place is a system of creative self-satisfaction, technological memorials, and dispersed authority.
As yet the new system has not shown its worth in mediating the needs of economic progress with the tricolour of civilisation: memory, creativity and knowledge but that might just be a question of time.
On the other hand people are apparently having more fun, everything is more democratised; but everything is less certain.
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