CSotD: Amusing ourselves to (other people’s) death

Comments ⁵

1. sam

   It makes me think about “bread and circus”, and “the opiate of the masses”…
   We all want to be entertained by simple and enjoyable things, be it sports or scandals or other silly stuff. Even the people that do know about Gaza, or climate change, or other important stuff. We care more about the results of our favourite team than about people that die in some far away place.

2. Mike Peterson

   Problem is, we’re running out of “far away places.” And in most countries, the news organizations assume it.
   Though American cultural hegemony is a bit of an embarrassment … I’m often aghast to hear how our most insipid crap is part of life for people in Australia, South Africa and other places that I’d like to think had more interesting things to ponder of an evening after dinner.

3. Sherwood Harrington

   Here’s something to ponder of an evening after dinner: we’re not simply running out of “far away places” — we never really had any to begin with. Here’s a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 when it was approximately four billion miles away: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/A181.jpg

4. Mike Peterson

   A nice merging of science and religion, Sherwood, because the question “Who is my neighbor?” has proven one of the more vexing in the New Testament — that is, there was a clear answer given by He Whom We Should Worship, but it was nothing anyone wanted to actually put into practice. And, yes, there is an interdependancy.
   On the other hand, our being able to get it all into one photo today does not change the practical distances that existed in the past, some of which had to do with physical travel and some of which were related to communication, because, until recently, there was little difference between the two.
   (And, if you insist on taking an astronomer’s perspective, that difference is almost immeasurably recent.)
   I used to use a Nast cartoon on the death of James Garfield in my presentation on political cartoons, and I would point out to the kids that we didn’t have radio and TV in those days, and the news of the president’s condition came once or twice a day, not every fifteen minutes.
   Moreover, I don’t think the post-Civil War notion of One Big Country had really kicked in yet, and people were not obsessed with the goings-on in Washington. They were more concerned with their own crops, their local government and the laws coming out of their state house, with the questions of coinage something of an abstraction for politicians and Big Business to quarrel and pontificate over.
   Here’s a major watershed: When the Sino-Japanese War happened in 1894-95, it was more a curiosity than a concern. Three years later, we had Dewey blowing up the Spanish fleet at Manila and now events on that side of the globe began to matter to us.
   IMHO, our entry into global imperialism is not a particularly admirable reason for having gained a wider perspective on these things, but there it was. However, we’d have gained it through the growth of communication even if we weren’t intent on sucking up everything we could reach with that advancing technology and corresponding shrinkage of distances, real and metaphorical.

5. Sherwood Harrington

   Off-topic, but spurred by your observations on the recent nature of instant communication:
   I like to point out to my students that we may be living in a very remarkable, short interval in the history of the species — one in which it is at least theoretically possible to have a real-time conversation with any other member of the species.
   If we ever do have human outposts on Mars or beyond, the finite speed of light (or any other form of electromagnetic radiation, such as radio) will make such conversations impossible. At a minimum for Earth-Mars communication, the delay between message sent and reply received will be eight minutes, and could be up to 40. Not exactly conducive to lively banter.