Dinosaur movie wammen = good
(media.communities.win)
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I have been holding on to this quote for a while from the second book in the JP series 'Lost World' and this is as good place as any to use it.
Ian Malcolm: "Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
"Yes? Why is that?" asked Harding.
"Because it means the end of innovation." Malcolm said.
"This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our on species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media --- it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity --- our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are you done?"
"Almost," Harding said. "Hang on."
"And believe me, it'll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn't require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It's just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was the dinosaurs --- being complex creatures --- might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction."
This is brilliant. Thank you.
While I am inclined to agree with Crichton's take now, given have things have panned out, I don't think it's as bad as laid out. For one thing, it's astonishing how not-online many people are, even younger people. Sites like Twitter or Youtube are really only frequented by a very small part of the population. I know someone who tries to stay informed about current events but still thinks reddit is "too far out there" to visit.
Since you mentioned accents, I work for a company in the US south/south east. I mostly work with small and local businesses. When I need to contact a company I either speak to a low level employee, like a receptionist, or the owner. Almost always I am greeted by a southern accent. The lower level employees I know are younger than myself and the owners I know are older. These are the not-online regular people. I don't know where they get their news from, if they bother to check at all, but they are certainly not part of the internet hive-mind. So there is still hope. And we have a large reach, covering many rural areas as well as most large cities in the south.
An interesting thing about the company I work for, even as new and re-opening jobs are almost entirely work from home, we only hire people in our region. As it was said to me "someone from New Jersey would have no idea how to handle these interactions" The company explicitly understands there is a cultural, regional component.
From what I've heard the Great Plains region is also doing the same thing, keeping business local and not expanding beyond their region to keep that "homey" feeling.
Nationalism vs. Globalism