Industrialization revolution had several reactionary movements….. Marxism was a reactionary movement in economical fields….. Existentialism was a reactionary movement in Philosophy….Pragmatism and liberal education was reactionary movement in education…..Mushrooming of fitness centers, nutrition and calorie-consciousness was a reactionary movement in health….. Mushrooming of civil societies was a reactionary movement in governance….and so on……Some of these reactionary movements were failure and some were somewhat successful…I will make a brief analysis later in this Philoknol….But,
As I showed in previous paragraph that there were several reactionary movements to industrialization….and now we are going to Digitalization…..From our experiences of the reactionary movement to industrialization it is expected that there are reactionary movements to it…What are the reactionary movements to digitalization?.....
I will let you to ponder about it a little bit….Let me help in finding the general trends of the previous reactionary movements…. You will note that amazingly most of the reactionary movements are suggesting the same solution……
………I like to begin from the most familiar field…that is Marxism… Carl Marx correctly identified that industrialization will create an enormous surplus and these surpluses will enslave men by creating a black hole (monopoly) of surpluses that devour the real earning of poor and weak and will increase the gaps between social classes….which may create anxiety among masses that may led to revolution……
The identification was correct (even collapse of Soviet Union and conversion of China to more free market economy…..the prediction of Marx is valid…..see the news that these days buzzing around the web that Apple has more cash than US government)……but the solution was really strange…..and it was the main reason of the failure of this reactionary movement…….
…….The solution was to return to the primitive period….Communism...or all out Socialism…..the experiments proved to be failure as contexts were Primitive societies weren’t there for support…….
…….Existentialism was reactionary movements in Philosophy….. The industrialization eroded the values that were for centuries on society…. Religious, Cultural and traditional values were helpless…so they weren’t of any help to modern men….Religion, Cultures and traditional values stand on the notion of the “ESSENCE”…… By erosion of the values…the concept of the “essence” also eroded…. And Existentialism comes as a reaction to fill the vacuum…. Existentialism replaced “essence” by “existence”….by declaring, “Existence precedes essence”….. Look to few characteristics of Existentialism and you will realize that it is calling to Primitive state of men just as Marxism was calling towards Primitive Societies,
- Existentialism movement becomes strong and appealing when values are eroded…..
- Existentialism asks for relying on emotions rather than on logic…..
- It asks for philosophy to deal with experiential issues than issues related to knowledge…..
As culture, social values and norms are products of advanced societies….so existentialism looks to them as a source of problems of individuals and look to solution to rely on the primitive aspect of individuals as primitive were relying on, emotions and experiences………… Well…this solution just like Marxism’s solution is outdated as digitalization asks more on relying on imaginations and knowledge….
We can go to other reactionary movements in the same manner…. Here, however I want to emphasize on one main problem that we are facing in the Digital/information period,
Let’s see it this way…… The industrialization and rapid technological advancements…changed very fast the life styles…commonly… made life easier and slowed down the use of the physical movements at work places…it even slowed down the use of physical movements in household works….. On other hand the food choices become diversified and frequent…. The change in life styles due to technological advancements were rapid but the physiological adaptations were very slow….the results of these gaps come out as widespread modern diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, and cancers….
The solutions come from health experts in nutrition (calorie consciousness) and regular exercises…. So… the solutions are known and experts are frequent to compensate for slower physiological adaptations in response to fast changes in life styles………
Now…it is more than a decade that we are in the digitalization age or information big bang…. The information big bang….was a big jump from local cultures to global cultures…………….The globalization of the cultures was so rapid that people didn’t have time to adapt their psyches to it…. Simply, we are living in a global culture with local psychology….. the big gap between psyche and global cultures have resulted in massive psychological imbalance…… Just as modern diseases are the side effects of the industrialization so the widespread confusions, identity crises, massive hatreds and most important…. Individual disorientations as result of spontaneous exposures is the most visible one………… I think we are not yet fully aware of the impacts of the side effects and hence we don’t see any major reactionary movements to digitalization……………
We are just seeing the clashes of titans…..We saw the collapse of My Space to Facebook and now people are expecting to witness the meltdown of Facebook to Google Plus….. This seems a normal process but it has clues to solution….. One Giant website creates a monopoly by being creative and another one breaks its monopoly by creativity….. It seems that…in order to become compatible with global culture…we need to use our creativity and become an active contributor to global culture rather than being a passive consumer and victims of the gaps created by it………………….
Now….while we are expecting a reactionary movement to digitalization….we see the same sort of solution to “reasoning”…..Now, the voices are coming to redefine “reasoning’s purpose”…. For thousands of years, reasoning was the main mechanism of Philosophy…which has determined its purpose as a tool for pursuit of truth….. Now that digitalization and world wide web has increased the importance and appeal for ….“reasoning” ….. to help in judging and choosing the useful information in a period of big bang (massive chaos) of information….. the purpose of information is explained by evolutionary behaviorists…..that it evolved to win arguments….. This was true for primitive men…..who hadn’t have to deal with global cultures and digitalization and winning arguments definitely would increase their fitness…..but for modern men who are exposed to global culture…and massive floods of information…..the primitive purpose of reasoning…will fail…as it failed in Marxism and Existentialism………. We don’t have the choice of choosing between Primitive world and global world……………
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