Quotes About Society

For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Tüketici psikodramalarla yat??t?r?lan bir hastad?r.

Los estadounidenses ya no hablan entre sí, sino que se entretienen recíprocamente. No intercambian ideas, sino imágenes.

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent

Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods—much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough—became the content of what people called "the news of the day.

Finalmente, Huxley intentaba decirnos que lo que afligía a la gente en "Un mundo feliz" no era que estaban riendo en lugar de pensar, sino que no sabían de qué se reían y por qué habían dejado de pensar.

Yeni teknolojiler eskiden beri süregelen enformasyon sorununu tepetaklak etmiÅŸtir: Ä°nsanlar bir zamanlar enformasyona gerçek hayat ortamlar?n? kendileri yönlendirebilmek amac?yla ihtiyaç duyarken, ÅŸimdilerde, asl?nda hiçbir iÅŸe yaramayan enformasyonlar?n görünüÅŸte yararl? olabileceÄŸi baÄŸlamlar? yaratmak zorunda kalmaktad?rlar.

to whom will the technology give greater power and freedom? And whose power and freedom will be reduced by it?

To which we might add that every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development. Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.

Television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.

Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil's observation that 'Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.' Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody.

Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization—not to mention their reason for being—reflects the world-view promoted by the technology.

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

reading Amusing Ourselves to Death in 2006, in a society that worships TV and technology as ours does, is nearly an act of defiance, one of those I-didn't-realize-it-was-dark-until-someone-flipped-the-switch encounters with an illuminating intellect?

In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.

America is engaged in the world's most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug.

In tabulating the cost of technological progress, Freud takes a rather depressing line, that of a man who agrees with Thoreau's remark that our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.

People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think

For in the end, he was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in 'Brave New World' was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)