Monday, July 02, 2007

Now...this

Eric Goodman has created a short video in the spirit of Neil Postman's critique of the "now this" discontinuity of television. (For the full treatment, read Amusing Ourselves to Death, especially chapter seven.) It uses video images to help subvert the subtle deceptions of video images.

5 comments:

  1. I thought this is more than appropriate from Chuck Colson's recent Breakpoint post...

    "for you literature-lovers, there's my absolute-favorite novel, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Don't be deterred by its length or its depth. Just think of it as the perfect antidote to all the media's attempts to shorten your attention span and keep your thinking as shallow as possible. Because this book won't allow you to do that. It asks the hard questions about life and faith, and it won't let you get away with easy answers. It's a great example of how wrestling with great literature can strengthen your faith and your thinking."

    Ditto!

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  2. I went to the site and couldn't figure out exactly what I was suppose to view.

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  3. When I watched the video I felt like I was watching my local news broadcast. The only thing missing was the weather man promising bad weather to make us all complain.
    I've been reading Schaeffer's The God Who is There, giving much reflection to his point that as a culture we uncritically accept the presupposition that we are the products of the impersonal and chance plus time. This video is a brief but accurate picture of a culture who has bought into pointlessness as the meaning of existence. Who wants spiritual depth and deep intellectual reflection when there's no point to any of it? It seems people would rather have the shallow and grotesque instead. Even things that should cause them to despair have turned into a form of entertainment in the denial of reality.

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  4. Os Guinness did a similar thing in a chapter of "Fit Bodies, Fat Minds".

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  5. ... and it's been pretty comprehensively parodies as well, in the (non-Christian) "The Day Today", from UK television - see YouTube for more.

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