Virtual Hot Pots and Brain Rot

by G. Murphy Donovan (March 2015)

“Science is becoming more pervasive and invasive” – Susan Greenfield

Who says that peers of the realm are anachronistic? Who claims that the House of Lords is a vestige of privilege and indolence? The Baroness of Ot Moor has written a book, a practical tome too, indeed a rare vessel of common sense. Susan Greenfield’s Mind Change is a courageous broadside at cyber culture, a dose of reality therapy for the Internet, social networks, video gaming, cyber gadgets, and the damage they might do to malleable, developing minds.  more>>>

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5 Responses

  1. Decisions. Which article shall I read? The one with a portrait of the winsome Susan Greenfield in relaxed state or the one with a photo of the nubile Clarfield “above the West Seti River.”

  2. Dear Mr Donovan – I will not disagree with most of your picks for utopian dreamers – Mohammed, Marx, Lenin, etc. But I’m not sure that Marshall McLuhan belongs on the list. My view of him was that he was, like Susan Greenfield, a diagnostician rather than a prescriber. He saw that electronic media were on their way to replacing the written word, and pointed out the loss (to all) that would occur when Aristotelian connectedness was replaced by such electronic media phenomena as the jump cut rather than any serial logic, the image, as opposed by any underlying fact, and so on. He thought that, in the West, we were on the way back to being an oral/aural society, a devolution from our literate heritage.

    I even thought that The Gutenberg Galaxy was as much a lament for what we were all about to lose, than a celebration of what little we were about to “gain”. Just a reaction. CC

  3. I agree, Chris. I believe I might have been thinking more of how he has been used than what he actually said or wrote. Were he writing today, methinks he might be apoplectic about a digital/virtual media that actually inhibits personal and civil communication, say nothing about reading a book.

  4. I agree, Chris. I believe I might have been thinking more of how he has been used than what he actually said or wrote. Were he writing today, methinks he might be apoplectic about a digital/virtual media that actually inhibits personal and civil communication, say nothing about reading a book.

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