Episode 61: Analog Minds, Digital Times: Welcome to Post Pandemic Humanity!

Today’s show marks our pandemic first anniversary. What happened? We’ll examine our changed world through the seismic changes to our communication environment and how these have reworked out value systems, our sense of self and communiy and the fundamental Enlightenment principals on which Western Democracies are built. We’re honored to have three of the best minds on this topic together for the first time! 

The Analog City and the Digital City L.M. Sacasas is author of “The Analog City and the Digital City,” in which he argues we’re living with two very different value and cultural systems inhabiting the same world at once. Our analog world is based on the printed word, agreed upon truth, deliberation. We, perhaps insanely, keep trying to apply it to our new environment: More fact checking! More science! Keep the fake stuff off Facebook. My truth is more truth than your truth! In a world of information scarcity and imbalance it’s easy to convince people of things. In a world of information abundance where anyone can be an information manufacture, truth is increasingly the story you tell, or the one you hear. Sacasas’ wrote his essay in the New Atlantis a year ago. Today we ask how these two cultures have weathered the pandemic, and whether a very different humanity is emerging

Pandemic as Media Next were joined by the dean of Understanding Media, Andrew McLuhan the grandson of Marshall McLuhan and leader of the McLuhan institute. Andrew is long time friend of Quarantime and we’re thrilled to have him join today to put an Understanding Media lens on our recent history. Much of what Sacasas writes about mirrors classic McLuhan insights: immersive media moves us away from enlightenment values back to oral society, less ordered, more mythical , not forged out of the principals of the scientific method. Todays show will give us a framework to understand the our world of digital evershock: unconscious bias, a life dictated by mysteries bots and black boxes we barely understand (are they not the gods of pre literate society, returned?), communities that are better at trolling than communing, digital identities that change our identity. 

And finally on todays show, let’s get analog! Author David Sax wrote the “Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter” in 2016. He’s at work on a sequel to that book looking at the pros and cons of what we’ve gained and lost in digital acceleration. David will help us understand what we’ve heard on todays earth-shifting show!