Is this the Information Age or the Exploitation Age..

[Jozen-Bo]

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...

It would be greatly appreciated and more influencial if you backed up your answer somehow ...thanks!!

 

[cosmictraveler]

It is the exploitation of information age!

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

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.

 

[cosmictraveler]

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.

 

[nietzschefan]

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.

I hope you say "Thank Charlemagne" every time you wake up to this world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_Renaissance

In Western culture, there had been an unbroken tradition in musical practice and theory from the earliest written records of the Sumerians (c. 2500 BC) through the Babylonians and Persians down to ancient Greece and Rome. However, the Germanic migrations of the 5th century brought about a break with this tradition. Most in western Europe for the next few centuries did not understand the Greek language, and thus the works of Boethius, who saw what was happening and translated ancient Greek treatises into Latin, became the foundation of learning during this period. The advent of scholarly reforms by Charlemagne, who was particularly interested in music, began a period of intense activity in the monasteries of the writing and copying of treatises in music theory — the Musica enchiriadis is one of the earliest and most interesting of these. Charlemagne sought to unify the practice of church music by eliminating regional stylistic differences. There is evidence that the earliest Western musical notation, in the form of neumes in camp aperto (without staff-lines), was created at Metz around 800, as a result of Charlemagne's desire for Frankish church musicians to retain the performance nuances used by the Roman singers.[9] Western musical practice and theory of today can be traced in an unbroken line from this time to the present, thus it had its beginnings with Charlemagne.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I hope you say "Thank Charlemagne" every time you wake up to this world . . . .

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.