[d3vvnull]

Or it could be that he just does not see how these new devices, which are today geared only to entertainment, could some day be used to further empower us. Perhaps, in the future we might see the iPad or other devices like it, be used in schools for delivering instructional, interactive content. They might serve as rich clipboards for carrying and streaming medical information in a hospital or other medical centers. As for Facebook and Twitter, while they are still mostly used for entertainment, they have also been useful for pushing up-to-minute status of things going on in places of political unrest or from the hospital rooms. When I was at the hospital with my daughter after her surgery, I used Facebook to provide continual updates to my friends and family about her condition.

So maybe Obama's comments simply lack imagination of how these devices could be more useful in the future. And I believe it's also true that some of the most significant technological innovations start out as toys.

[ErrantX]

could, perhaps, maybe

This is the problem; who is starting/making this paradigm shift? And can they cause such a shift to remove the bias towards entertainment and information overload.

Sure, there are lots of examples (Iran for example) of the utility of modern media. But currently the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad - and getting worse.

That, I think, is the point.

[philwelch]

Yes, and maybe television will be used to bring education and culture to the masses.

[commieneko]

Television (and movies, and telephones, and newspapers) _have_ brought education and culture to the masses. Really. Go back in time a couple of hundred years and talk to some regular folks. Salt 'o the Earth, industrious (maybe), and worldly even, but _not_ educated or culturally sensitive in great numbers. It's important to remember that the teeming masses didn't use all that time they spent not watching television reading Shakespeare and Newton...

[philwelch]

Nor have they spent all the time they do watch television watching Shakespeare or learning physics.

[commieneko]

No, but more of them are doing it now than in Shakespeare's time. (Okay, they were watching it on stage rather than on TV; the period's equivalent of soap operas and sitcoms...)

As a percentage and in absolute numbers there are more educated people, by nearly anyone's definition of education, than at any time in history up to now. And television, mass communication in general, plays a large part in that.

As hard as it is for many to imagine, a lot of what passes for junk culture and time wasting trivia these days will be considered high art in the future. Future pundits will decry how the youth of the country are wasting their time with the latest feelie dramas and grab-o-vision media instead of partaking of more uplifting fare like downloading _Maru, the box cat_ and staying up all night playing _Tomb Raider_...

[philwelch]

See, you're changing the goalposts. I'm talking about TV, you're talking about mass media in general. I'm comparing, say, 1945 and 1965, you're comparing 1810 and 2010. (Or 1610 and 2010.) There are too many confounds and you can't just throw everything since then (wider college education, mass publication) in with television as if they're even remotely the same thing.

I know there are a handful of TV series that constitute legitimate art, and an even rarer handful of those which are even popular. But by and large, TV isn't an improvement to the average person's level of culture or education. It's not necessarily a setback, but it's not an improvement, either.

[commieneko]

Go back and read your parent post. The discussion is clearly mass media, or at least the effect of new media on society.

As someone who grew up in the 50s and 60s I can tell you from first hand experience that TV was used massively for education, and that it had a profound effect. Was it used for other things? Things more visible? Sure. Is all TV educational? That's a harder question to answer; note my point about what is considered culture at any given time. Sturgeons Law applies to TV like everything else, so we can't only judge a form by its worse 90%...

As for broading the discussion, which I refute, it's impossible to discuss the effects of one mass communication medium without discussing it within its context. At least not very meaningfully. If you scan around the posts on this page you'll find a post from me making references to the history of reading, writing and printing.