One of my favorite reading assignments in high school was a short book of extremely short chapters written by Sherwood Anderson, named “Winesburg, Ohio”. The first chapter, as I recall, was about an old man who scribbled down notes about the people in his hometown and then he crumpled up the scraps of paper he had written them on and stuck them in his pocket. I think this chapter was called “The Book of the Grotesque”, I guess referring to the archive of little balls of paper he had stashed away in his pockets.
Today, I too want to write down some such notes about the world I live in, mainly my own views about the situation I share with the people who coinhabit this planet with me. Of course I am well aware that I know very little about the vast majority of people on Earth — my hunch is that less than one billion (out of the over eight billion) people living are native speakers of English, far less are native speakers of German, and far, far, far (that’s very far) less are anywhere near as focused on languages and literacy as I am … and so quite probably the less than 1% of people who are simply as “academically” oriented as I am number more like at most ten million people world-wide. Distilling that number down again by a factor of the commonly quoted one percent who are actually active participants in online communications and my “peeps” dwindle down to maybe a mere 100,000 (worldwide). I could go on like this until I reach the conclusion that there are probably only a handful of people who seem to understand me at least half as much as I believe to understand myself.
Oops — did I just go off on a tangent? Sorry about that. 🙂
Where was I? Oh, not much of anywhere yet. Let me get back there.
In the USA, where currently many mobs are running rampant and talking on tiktok all day and all of the night, things are getting sorta cray-cray real fast. The USA is undoubtedly the global #1 in both military technology and also in propaganda technology (despite the popularity of the recent Chinese upstart). This is not some overnight sensation — just listen to Ike’s “warning” speech given almost 70 years ago:
I feel that in the intervening time, the USA has been too much focused on the expansion of liberty (or “freedom”) and too little focused on the responsibility required to impart and train to the appropriate levels of literacy (and similar capabilities — such as “publicacy” [1]) with respect to the use of such powerful technologies as have been developed by the undisputed world leaders in both military technology and also propaganda technology.
Today in the United States of America people of all ages have virtually free access to these technologies without even so much as one iota of literacy in how to use them appropriately. Indeed, I fear that the situation globally might even be far worse than that (though perhaps in some countries the access to these technologies may be somewhat less liberal than in the USA).
Worldwide, in the past seven decades we have witnessed a vast expansion of liberty and freedom to use powerful technologies with only an insignificantly small amount of responsibility towards the expansion of literacy needed to know how to use such technologies appropriately.
The risks and dangers that someone may accidentally press a wrong button or trigger or whatever seem to be increasing rapidly.
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