"Even though the internet is beautiful, the price he pays is a lot worse than the non-reality he gets."

"As your perspective on reality becomes increasingly mediated through third parties, there is an inevitable loss of individual autonomy and control.

You are accessing the direct reality available to you less and less in favor of what is being designed and fed to you, those designers gain control over your world view that they would not otherwise have.

You may not notice or care about the difference and your descendants may never know any alternative.

However, once upon a time there were people who mourned the loss of individuality that came with literacy, the ability to mass produce the arguments and speeches of some voices to the detriment of others.

One effect of this process is to deaden the methodology by which one individually comes to understand the world in favour of a prepackaged set of views and beliefs that are accessed more easily.

Much later, there was a widespread cultural awareness of loss of individuality and autonomy in the age of radio, which played an important (arguably non-critical) role in the rise of totalitarianism throughout the world. This has often been seen to have been extended through television, where wars from Vietnam to Persian Gulf become reality shows in which the audience is given a small slice of the real just deceptive enough to suppress their individual concerns that lie beyond the scope of the presentation.

We will never fully know just how much is lost in each of these jumps. Nor will we have any objective measure of the relative value of what is gained. It would be impossible to deny that there are benefits to each form of mediation. Personally, however, I do find the flippant acceptance of the losses on the basis entertainment value to be disturbing in the implications concerning the human desire to discover difficult truths, as opposed to being fed entertaining lies." - borahorzagobuchol

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