Wonderful Appearance, Terrible Behavior
The two in our world tend to go together. People want to be dazzled and cannot tell they are just being fooled.
People have been lying to each other forever, but our built-in lie detectors have enabled us to cope with much of this. We can usually tell just by looking at a person’s face whether he is lying to us or not.
With print this became much harder. The printed word can, and often does, lie. And fact-checking (doing even more reading) became necessary. Although people often did not bother – especially in the case of religious writing.
With the Mass Media (Cinema, Radio and Television) this became impossible because we could be overwhelmed by all kinds of special-effects, such as dramatic music in the background, and clever (but misleading) plots. Our smartest minds concentrated on doing this – because the biggest money and the most power financed them.
The most important effect of this was not noticed – people could be controlled so easily, they lost the ability to control themselves. And only wanted to be entertained.
Can we combat this? Yes, by improving our latest technology, the computer/software/internet thing – as I am doing with my online Human-Computer Interface course – which I highly reccomend. By controlling our Internet, we can start to control ourselves.
Will anyone do this? You know the answer to that.
In case you do want to know more, check this out Designing for the Scent of Information
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