Radio has been around less than 100 years, television for less than 50, cable for less than 30, and the internet for less than 20 years. The world we live in is being radically influenced by this new deluge of mass communication. We most certainly DO NOT appreciate the degree that these mediums will affect the very nature of our perceptions. Just one small example of this is the difference between how an idea impacts someone's mind and how images impact our minds.
Ideas drip into our consciousness one word, one sentence, and one paragraph at at time. We have the opportunity to weigh the concepts being presented to us, and if we choose to exercise discernment, we can simply pick and choose between ideas we believe to be true, good, and right and those we believe to be bad, wrong, and false.
When dealing with images, however, impact is probably a very accurate descriptive. Sounds can cause a physiological response. Audio and visual images simultaneously presented can especially provoke powerful chemical responses in our brains and bodies. Now more than ever we have the ability to present thousands of ideas, but it seems to me we are too busy drowning in a sea of millions of images. The more this is meditated on, the scarier it becomes to me.
In our culture images are more about amusement(no thought) than about musing(thought). This is because we've stumbled upon a lethal combination of a reckless pursuit of pleasure through ourselves by way of the infinite number of escapist fictional realities that are provided by our saturation of electronic media. Meanwhile, the cultures without this blessing/epidemic of media saturation face reality head on and deal with it because they are not given any other option than to do so. Anyone care to prophecy where this is leading us?
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