The Post-Idea World

An anonymous reader sends this quote from an opinion piece in the NY Times: "If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don't care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can't instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé. ... There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young — a form in which ideas are more difficult to express. But these factors, which began decades ago, were more likely harbingers of an approaching post-idea world than the chief causes of it."

Comments

Re:Actually...

[crawling_chaos]

Nothing could be farther from his point than your misinterpretation of it. The reasons why I leave as an exercise for the reader of the article. In other words, someone other than you. One hint, you know the author's point is not going to be summed up in an easily tweetable soundbite when midway through one of the paragraphs leads with "BUT the analogy isn’t perfect."