I grew up in a house where TV was banned. Sugar cereal and candy were frowned upon, but television, especially Saturday morning cartoons, was the ultimate forbidden fruit. Prohibition rarely works and in my case that proved true; I begged for gum in the line at the supermarket, enjoyed orange-flavored aspirin a bit too much and looked longingly at lollipops dropped in parking lots. But nothing trumped TV. I remember waking early and sneaking downstairs to illicitly watch as the test pattern segued into Looney Toons. Yet my stealth was insufficient -- one day in 1975 my mother caught me and kicked a hole in the TV's screen. I'll never forget the days as the shattered set lay on the curb waiting for the garbage crew to haul it away.
Her logic was pretty simple (I think the words "rotting your brain in front of that wretched tube" may have been used). She wanted me to read, to love books, to learn in a particular way. Was she right? Well she may have been and today I'll explore the affect that the evolution that media is having on the stories we tell, how we think and the culture that we create.
Tonight's post involves some sleight of hand. If you've ever watch a shell game or 3 card monty, you know that being told you're going to be tricked doesn't help at all. You're still the shill and you always pick the wrong shell.
So I'll explain the trick quickly. Tonight, I will give you a brief introduction to the topic and hopefully, arouse your curiosity. The rest of the trick will wait until tomorrow. Here goes.
So yesterday's post ended with a question: "What does the future look like if we stay the course and allow short term desires to override long-term sanity"? I'll try to handle tonight's post by outlining the plot of one of the stupidest, funniest and gigglingly prophetic films out there, Idiocracy.
A man is chosen for an Army experiment to test the effects of cryogenic freezing. He is supposed to be in suspended animation for 1 year, but bureaucracy fails and he is left untouched for 500 years. When he awakens in 2505, society has changed slightly. The more intelligent folks in the human race have somehow clued into their collective plight and damped down on breeding quickly. At the same time; the less intelligent have had ever more children. This process runs several iterations. The world lies in ruin. (The movie is ridiculous enough that the shallow-end-of-the-gene-pool metaphors don't offend)
