I've heard that we are entering or have entered the Age of Information. When I look around it looks more like we are entering the Exploitation Age...human exploitation is a science, and a very successful one too. So is this the Age of Information or the Age of Exploitation...Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It would be greatly appreciated and more influencial if you backed up your answer somehow ...thanks!!
I'm sure people said the same thing about every Paradigm Shift when it started. Look at the early years of the Industrial Revolution: sweat shops, tenement housing, breakdown of the family, urban squalor. That certainly qualified as "exploitation." But eventually we got past it to enjoy the benefits of an industrial economy over an agrarian one: leisure time, discretionary income, recreational travel, public education, universal literacy, careers in something besides food production and distribution, the rise of the middle class. The Electronic Revolution (which began in 1834 with the first telegraph) has already enriched life by providing something which, to me at least, outweighs all of its evils: the complete library of the world's music, professionally performed and precisely reproduced, available 24/7. You can exploit me all you want as long as I've got my music. I can't imagine living on a farm 200 years ago (when virtually everyone was a farmer), with my music limited, at best, to the bored pianist in the saloon on Saturday night and the amateur choir in the church on Sunday morning.
Depending upon which country you lived in at the time. Over 600 years ago in Europe choirs and orchestras were playing in major cities. Even China had a musical thing going with all of its instruments it made. So again it depended upon where you were located. There are many places today that do not have music or TV or even electricity as yet.
I hope you say "Thank Charlemagne" every time you wake up to this world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_Renaissance
Every culture has developed music. The underpinnings of European music may have been developed by various offshoots of Mesopotamian civilization. But the blues modality and the intricate syncopation that characterize most of the modern popular music that is the sound track to my life (and were rejected with horror my many Euro-Americans at the time) were superimposed upon them by Afro-Americans, and presumably imply an African influence. My taste in "classical" music goes back no farther than the Impressionists, who also greatly expanded on Charlemagne's legacy and took it into new territory. So when I wake up to this world I suppose I should also be thanking Claude Debussy, Scott Joplin, Benny Goodman and Chuck Berry. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
