| I think that the article over-estimates strongly the influence of entertainment to a certain degree when it comes to our intellectual development. And I am someone who consumes a lot of media. While it's true some will profit from the intellectual properties, I would argue in order to see this side of an entertainment show, one must have the intellectual capacity to do so in the first place. An "intelligent" person might see an existential moral conflict portrayed brilliantly in something like Breaking Bad, others see a story about Drugs, Tough guys, cool Misfortunes, funny incidents, black humour and they don't notice or derive any moral teachings from it. (I might misrepresent Breaking Bad here to some degree, I have not seen it completely. Could have also named examples like Spirited Away, Watership Down, ... simple cartoons to some, but they are missing the bigger picture.) That's why shows which rate high among TV Critics and get a lot of viewers, normally appeal to both, those who see the big picture, and those who are appealed to the "superficial" version of it. Academia does not have to entertain in the same way, but academia will also change radically when it comes to getting a point across. Technology will help incredibly with bringing abstract information to people outside of a specific scientific field. We humans are not good at Maths, not at all. We humans are good at touching, smelling, visualizing things. Albert Einstein was one of the most influential physicists in the 20th century, and even though his ideas (at that time) must have seemed incredibly counter-intuitive, it was through thought experiments with a large amount of visualization, that helped him form his theories. Visuals are so important. And they'll become better and better, and we will be able to do them more effectively and in a whole new way as technology progresses. Think about proper 3D-Virtual Environments, 3D Position Tracking in a room with a VR-Headset. The possibilities we have there. I remember very clearly when we talked about Retrograde Motion of planets in school. By the time we were finishing sketching it out everybody understood it[1]. In order to understand it, not everybody has to be able to reach the conclusion themselves. Why do planets seem to move backwards / stop and turn around? 30 Seconds of video will explain it to the layman, enough so that he is satisfied with the answer and actually gets it. Education may progress particularly slowly, but eventually we will reach a completely different form of education and will have incredibly clever ways of getting information across. Academia does not have to primarily entertain, but it should also be able to quickly get the point across, we will get there. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72FrZz_zJFU |