Something I thought worth sharing, on television and intellectual thought:
In his work On Television, Bourdieu “invokes intellectuals’ long history of opposition to ‘fast thinking’ (a history he traces back to Plato) in his critique of the roles intellectuals are forced into on television: the kind of ‘fast-thinker’ required be television is most likely to ‘think in clichés, in the received ideas’ that Flaubert talks about – ‘banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally’. Fast-thinkers ‘offer cultural “fast-food” – predigested and prethought culture’ – in part because they are easily found in journalists’ little black books and also because the people ‘who really have something to say’ require more effort to seek out, and may not be well-trained to speak to the press at all (Bourdieu 1996: 11,28 in Sterne 2003, 372).
2 comments:
A further interesting question would be to what extent the internet has proliferated “fast-thinking”.
I have developed a terrible habit of googling instead of rationalizing. It’s the lazy way to make a point - If someone else has thought about it, its probably on the net – and paraphrasing their opinion is probably easier than articulating my own.
In an age when people get so much of their information from websites, blogs and message boards (often with questionable or unverifiable sources) and debates are carried out in minutes, I wonder what affect “fast-thinking” is having on the development of opinions and arguments
For sure, I agree that our communications on the net often take this form, especially when going through emails and trying to create meaningful responses to interesting issues within short periods of time. Emails are so ephemeral; we don't tend to think on them for days before responding as we might have in the days of written or typed letters. The net is all about speed and efficiency. This blog, also mediated and materialized by/through this interface, offers some potential to resist this tendency to 'think fast' and to exchange ideas on a more substantive level. That is one of my hopes anyway.
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