(08-31-2019, 06:33 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(08-31-2019, 04:50 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: In the post-WW2 period there was a lot of anti-technology sentiments. Beatniks and hippies wanted to go back to nature, 1970 anarchists destroyed computers and after the Chernobyl disaster anti-nuclear sentiments became mainstream.
And then millennials came, trusting technology as no generation since the GIs. I know this is what S&H predicted, but what specific reasons made millennials develop this way?
How people use technology is what's not to trust not the technology itself. I like using the internet to search for things and to learn, for information. I don't trust lab meat however or a lot of the advances people seem to be pushing for or the lack of privacy people seem to want. Social media also has me iffy and how people are willing to trust strangers online more than their own thoughts and experiences. I see technology as a tool that can be used for good or evil. Some technologies I choose, others I eschew.
I know people who will not eat anything that was cooked in a microwave oven. It is the easiest way to cook, and the fastest, and it is possible to design entrees that can be presentable and tasty. If the alternative is a high-fat, low-nutrient hamburger, then I might prefer the boxed entree out of the freezer compartment.
People buying stuff on line are largely buying what they used to buy in a brick-and-mortar store -- often Montgomery-Ward, Tower Records, Camelot Music, Musicland, Blockbuster, Borders' Books, Waldenbooks, Mervyn's, Radio Shack... and I might soon add Sears to the list. I have bought video, music, and books from the Big A... stuff that I might have bought at an entity now defunct. Social media is excellent for doing such banal things as exchanging recipes, and the banal stuff is harmless. Of course, devious people have found ways in which to hijack social media for political ends. OK, so the Russian FSB has created such fronts as "Tenn GOP" that one can access from Tennessee without being able to find operating in Tennessee, which is much like the Communist fronts that parroted the Soviet line on foreign policy without identifying themselves as Communist. Rumors and myths, including the most egregious of all (the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion that claims a Jewish plot for world domination and exploitation) did not need technology any more sophisticated than a printing press when such was how one got books.
People still need solid tests of truth, which means that they need more (not less!) formal learning, especially of the liberal-arts variety, to be able to discern sense from nonsense. People will need solid knowledge of history to be able to reject the mythologization of history. Just because something so sordid as Holocaust denial comes through sophisticated technology does not mean that it is valid. People need to know enough psychology to recognize manipulative deceit when it happens and economics to recognize that there is no such thing as a free lunch. People need a moral compass so that they are appalled if they are offered the lure of child pornography. We do well enough in operating the devices of technology; we are poor at deciding what to get from it.
I recognize that the ease of spending money is no excuse for spending it foolishly. We have foolishly decided that monopoly and trusts are good for generating profits by gouging people and that those who wax fat from such are somehow admirable -- as shown in our political choices. We seek mindless entertainment instead of uplifting culture. We fall for demagogues like Trump this time with the potential of falling for left-wing mirror-images of him some time soon.
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.