#media

Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter? ↗

— Neil Postman

#dystopia #laughter #media #age

Her constant orders for beheading are shocking to those modern critics of children's literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. Even the Oz books of L. Frank Baum, so singularly free of the horrors to be found in Grimm and Andersen, contain many scenes of decapitation. As far as I know, there have been no empirical studies of how children react to such scenes and what harm if any is done to their psyche. My guess is that the normal child finds it all very amusing and is not damaged in the least, but that books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis. ↗

— Martin Gardner

#children #death #literature #media #reading

Yet, the main issue is not the shaping of the minds by explicit messages in the media, but the absence of a given content in the media. ↗

— Manuel Castells

#communication

My actions to promote peace, the mediation missions which I carried out during many conflicts, which very often occurred between brothers of the same country, are not driven by any ulterior motives or any calculations based on personal ambitions. ↗

— Omar Bongo

#any #based #between #brothers #calculations

The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation. ↗

— Neil Postman

#culture #media #age

In the developed countries of the capitalist world, the mass media are beginning to become businesses, and huge businesses at that. The freedom of journalists is now becoming, in most cases, a very relative thing: it ends where the interests of the business begin... In socialist areas, it is enough to recall that the means of social communication are the monopoly of the party. ↗

— Hélder Câmara

#journalism #media #socialism #business

This denial is bizarre. Last time Chomsky denied something I attributed to him, it was Chomsky's word against mine and there was no way to resolve this argument. This time, however, there's some fairly conclusive evidence. Look at http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/. It describes itself as 'the official weblog of Professor Noam Chomsky', and it is attached to Z Magazine, for which Chomsky has regularly written for over a decade. It claims Chomsky makes direct blog entries. Yet Chomsky claims he has 'nothing to with with it'. Are we really meant to believe this? If it is true, why does he carry on writing for a magazine that publishes a false blog in his name? ↗

— Johann Hari

#england #media-lens #noam-chomsky #z-communications #communication

Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier. ↗

— Ellen Lupton

#modernism #new-media #swiss-style #design

Facebook has been spreading across the continents faster than a highly contagious Asian bird flu! ↗

— Gemini Adams

#facebook #flu #humor #humor-books #social-media

Do people in the twenty-first century still dance?" My heart beat thundered in my ears, far louder than the slow music. "Um," I said, barely able to swallow, my throat had gone so dry. "Sometimes." "How about now?" he asked. And then his strong arms were encircling my waist, his breath soft against my cheek as he gently whispered my name: "Susannah. Susannah.... ↗

— Meg Cabot

#jesse-de-silva #susannah-simon #suze-simon #the-mediator #dreams