Re: To SRC regulars....

Straydog wrote:
On Tue, 27 Feb 2006, Russell.Martin@xxxxxxx wrote:

Straydog wrote:
On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, BMJ wrote:

Straydog wrote:

<snip>

And, earlier today I spent some time looking at some "soc.culture.*"
newsgroups. Amazing how much spam propaganda is there. Everything from the
pro-India (I wonder how much these guys are geting paid), to penny stock
pitches, to all kinds of blather. Newsgroups, a lot of them, have sure gone
downhill. I remember not too many years ago that you didn't see much of
this blatant commercial propaganda and hype, but you could find young brats
making posts where one guy calls another guy a name,

Many of those brats are likely not so young any more. I'd wager that some of
them might have grey hair. ;-)

Well, I'm making a parallel with ham radio and CB radio. Back around the
late '50s, the FCC took eleven meters away from the hams (pissing them off
suprememly) and gave it to the CBers (to their infinite childish joy) and
while the CBers did do some good things around the country, the vast
majority behaved poorly and illegally and with low intelligence. Besides
low brow conversations, the major goals were to look out for the cops
(smokey bears, four wheelers, etc) and the local loose women (the beaver
report). And, thus radio spectrum became occupied by the "unwashed"
generation. And, so, the internet gets turned over, around 1990, from
the academics/military/gov to joe blow, And what do we get? Just like
television: content dumbed down, over the decades from 1950s to now, from
being aimed at average HS diploma viewer to about, what, first or second
grade elementary school mentality? Ever see that Brits TV "Teletubies"?
They don't even talk; they make peeping noises, or something like that.

And one of them might be gay. :-)

Oh...sheesh! 21st Century PC? Remember James Watt and his public comment
just before he resigned? We've got one of everything on the committee....
(?)

For the whole program. I saw one episode with the wife and I looked at her
(and her, me): what was the constructive purpose of that? Or, was there
recognizable purpose of any kind there?

Teletubies is for the 18 to 24 month old crowd, for crying
out load.

My wife, who reads the low brow newspapers and is up on all the trivia,
snot, gossip, ***, etc., of a wide swath of society, told me that she
gathers that from what she's read, in Britain "Teletubies" is what the
drug-crown watches while they do drugs.

Yeah, 2 year olds and drugees, but I don't think PBS chose
to put it on for drugees, but I could be wrong.

Or, am I in the disappearing
minority because I don't do drugs?

Probably. :-)

It's like pre-Sesame Street. Yeah, it's drivel to
adults. The thing I found frightening is the 1984-ish speakers
coming out of the ground giving orders to the Teletubies,

Yeah, I remember that! Good analogy with 1984, but I'm thinking they are
the analogs of all modern day advertising (you know "buy this" "buy that"
etc)

the
androidish antennae and TVs they have, and the robot
sweeper running all over the place. I've always wondered
if the producers snuck that stuff in with a sly wink.

Good question. Ever read "Waiting for Godot" by Beckett?
Or see the play > (if it was ever offered anywhere that you noticed)?

Once live, once on TV.

Maybe I should pull
out some quotes for everyone to study, but I'd want to pull quotes from
the "analysis" that I read more recently.

Another one, made for TV, was "Max Headroom" all about a guy who got
captured inside a computer (don't ask how that is possible, but parallels,
I guess, with "Tron") but it had a lot of sardonic parallels with the
foibles and failures of modern society, too.


I loved "Max Headroom". Too bad it didn't have a longer
run, along with "Dinosaurs".

Cheers,
Russell

.

Quantcast