The Dumbing Down of America
Or, Whatever Happened to Hayley Mills?
People assume that Americans today are more sophisticated and less gullible because we have become a more visually-oriented society. But in the process of becoming more visual, we have become less literate and less literary, less educated and less informed, less conversational and less relational, less "thinking" (both logically and in regards to "horse sense"); we have a shorter attention span and are more inclined to addiction, violence, etc. What that means is that our society is more vulnerable to sensationalism by the media, manupulation by advertisers, gullibility of a new sort, emotionalism, repeating the mistakes of the past, following after the latest "star" (whether rock, movie or sports), etc. More than ever, we are a society of sheep going astray and less a nation of individual thinkers and doers as our forefathers were.
I don't know of any advantage of becoming a more visually-oriented society and I know of hundreds of disadvantages. The Egyptians were a visually-oriented society. What that produced, ultimately, was a weak society of god-rulers (stars) and slaves (fans).
Thinking and communication have always been based on words, not images. The Egyptians may have been great artists, engineers and builders, but they were by no means great thinkers. The Greeks and Romans were far more literary, and were therefore far greater thinkers. The British were probably the most literary of all societies and they have produced the greatest thinkers of all time, including our founding fathers.