I wonder what Asimov would write if he were to re-do that review now? Now that we actually do have televisions that can hear us as well as show us ads and in which governments of every nominal political stripe are falling over themselves in the rush to buy Palantir's products and to inject monitoring software into every mobile phone and 3D printer.

▲

tenthirtyam 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to mislead and deflect populations' attentions.

Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.

▲

ahazred8ta 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

(1958) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Brave_New_Worl...

▲

krapp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The TV was evil?

I feel like people forget that so much of what they blame on social media now existed with television. Propaganda, misinformation, addiction, emotional manipulation, mind rot, overstimulation, excessive advertising, even moral panics blaming it for violence and deviant behavior.

Television didn't create self-reinforcing bubbles of hyperreality because it represented a corporate model of reality applied to an entire culture. It could only do so much being a one-way means of communication, but bear in mind all most people do with social media now is consume. The more social media becomes like television, the worse it becomes.

▲

JuniperMesos 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I would go so far as to say that the criticisms of broadcast television were completely correct; and that for all the problems of modern centralized social media and other internet use, one major good thing that it has done is kill off broadcast television. It is much easier now than it was for much of the 20th century for random ordinary people who weren't members of established mass media organizations to broadcast their ideas to the world, and try to build an audience that cares about their message. And even though this results in a lot of bad content being made (or just content that is uninteresting to you personally), it also allows a lot of gems to rise to people's attention that never would have under the old mass culture making system.

	▲	andsoitis 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> it also allows a lot of gems to rise to people's attention that never would have under the old mass culture making system. What is such an example? I just want to calibrate what you consider a gem that could not have been made in mass culture making system.

▲

janwillemb 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

His point is that the Orwellian way of surveillance is impossible to do in practice, and that a proper science fiction writer would have left the surveillance to machines. So I think his critique is about the art of SF writing, not about the prediction of surveillance itself.

▲

rawgabbit 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

He would write a mea culpa. 1984 is a warning. And that warning is playing out in our lives. We are in a post-truth world.