"The future will either be an inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future," Aurelio Peccei wrote in 1981.
From the beginning of culture, people told stories, made songs and poems, to convey ethical and human messages, inspire, and generallyâto embody and transmit 'good culture'.
But when the new media came, the official institutions of culture, such as the academy, found themselves unprepared; they were not structurally equipped to implement their basic functions in the new media.
Can we say that for a moment the media became the instruments of pseudo-culture, or even of anti-culture?
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Consider, for a pointed example, the World of Warcraft: Games, and of course also songs and movies and other media material, are the natural means for developing values and habits in the youth. Presently, those 'instruments of culture' are largely evolving according to commercial interests.
Which means that they are optimized w.r.t. to one criterion aloneâcaptivating young people's attention.
It is left to the school (or more generally to 'culture') to competeâfor the kid's attention; and for undoing the ethical and other damage; with far more modest financial and technical means.
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Hermes works on enabling a new paradigm in culture by working directly with cultural foundations (epistemology), which are due to change also for fundamental reasonsâsee my (DK) blog post Science and Religion).
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See the article How to begin the next Renaissance