FROM THE ARCHIVES: POST ONE
Thursday, August 4, 2011This article remains as relevant today as it was when I published it, October 31, 2009.
The motif of 21st Century news media and information technology affecting our culture demonstrates an unintentional theme manifest throughout this blog. Originally, GidgetWidget 2.0 began as an experiment. I never imagined myself still here and blogging two years later. Most of all, realizing many of my published articles explore and question the affects of media on the social and political theaters. Our ability to distinguish propaganda and how technology affects our understanding, these represent motifs emerging from the Archives. “The Media Eating Its Head,” may be the first, building up to articles like MINING EMOTIONS: WHAT MAKES US SO INVINCIBLE? or 21st CENTURY STORY TELLING AND ART: PART ONE
My Twitter bio states that I read the Western Canon for fun. The truth is, I continue reading and learning the Classics not because it is fun, but because of its relevance. Its value, dear reader, diminishes with every ad hominem tweet.
We are very much the same as our Ancestors. Whether we follow the pattern of mistakes, or whether learning from these mistakes we avoid the horrific consequences, remains to be unseen.
Now in many ways it was natural to our ancestors, moved by a single resolve, to fight the battles of justice: for the very beginning of their life was just. They had not been collected, like most nations, from every quarter, and had not settled in a foreign land after driving out its people: they were born of the soil, and possessed in one and the same country their mother and their fatherland. [18] They were the first and the only people in that time to drive out the ruling classes of their state and to establish a democracy, believing the liberty of all to be the strongest bond of agreement; by sharing with each other the hopes born of their perils they had freedom of soul in, their civic life, [19] and used law for honoring the good and punishing the evil. For they deemed that it was the way of wild beasts to be held subject to one another by force, but the duty of men to delimit justice by law, to convince by reason, and to serve these two in act by submitting to the sovereignty of law and the instruction of reason.
— LYSIAS, FUNERAL ORATION [17 – 19] from Perseus
In what manner has the use of reason and logic changed over time? Enough so that in the 21st Century, with access to infinite resources and information, its application is falling into a state of entropy.
If you see the ignorance manifest in our media and in the digital landscape, then how can you not ask your readers to look more closely and notice it? We have intelligence, enormous potential; but will we throw it all away so easily? Our Ancestors have. They chose the Bread and Circuses, and the consequences which followed stand out as the Dark Ages.
We are hardly invincible but yet, why do we presume we are?
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COPYRIGHT 2011 BY KIMBERLY COX
~ GIDGETWIDGET™
Kimberly Cox: The Gidgetwidget 
In fairness human nature plays a huge role in such a carnivorous desire for trash. William Randolph Hearst all those years ago took full advantage of such beastly traits by launching huge tabloid campaigns to sell his stories. Odd how it’s entertaining to hear bad news or anything salacious. This is now a plane where anyone with a monumental inferiority complex can make him/herself feel important with one memorable act, regardless of how despicable. Where dumbed down yet loquacious reality shows have replaced true art in scripted television (not that some scripted shows haven’t been trash). Most news is punditry, and venomous ones at that. The brainwashing and herding of humanity can only be stopped by people like you Kimberly, and your choosing to stay an original thinker, and genuine person!
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