09-18-2018, 09:36 PM
(09-18-2018, 06:35 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: The next cycle's favourite art form might be virtual reality.
Like cinema, the emergence of that artistic expression is a technological innovation. Michelangelo might have been an excellent film director except that cinema did not exist in his time. I can easily imagine J S Bach falling in love with the possibilities of a synthesizer, but note was available to him. Picasso would have likely done well with virtual reality, but it wasn't available to him.
The old standard media (and by 2050 even cinema will be an old form of expression with nobody remembering the 'early' cinema except as an exercise in appreciation of the archaic) will still be around. Replacing a dead-tree edition of a book with a Kindle or Nook (or whatever follows) will not make the use of the text something other than reading.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.