Honestly I kind of end up feeling guilty when preposterous “THE NEW MEDIA IS KILLING US” arguments get raised. It’s kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, the rate of introduction of new media is now fast enough that most of us can recall from our own childhood things that were going to tear civilization apart that for some reason didn’t.

I remember in university, one of my profs arguing that civilization and culture was in clear decline because no one had produced anything as intelligent as Plato in recent times. I remember, vainly, trying to explain that comparing Plato to [random modern text] was insane. Plato is a pinnacle of ancient achievement that has survived a test of millenia. [random modern text] hasn’t even been tried. Plato had many contemporaries and very few of them have made it this far. Likewise, we can rightly expect that the overwhelming majority of current human thought, speech and writing will be lost thousands of years from now.

People seem to fall into the trap of old vs new: video games are “simulated experiences”, but books somehow aren’t. Text messaging is ruining the language, but the printing press was glorious for it. Is there a word for this kind of fallacy?

But yeah. Though I didn’t find all that much hand-wringing among philosophers – most seemed genuinely willing to consider that a perfect simulation of an authentic experience just IS an authentic experience.