The Four Ages of Media

Throughout history, the way we share and consume information has undergone profound transformations, each defined by a dominant medium of communication. These shifts, spanning centuries, decades, and perhaps an eternity, are not merely technological advancements—they reflect the evolving dynamics of human connection, creativity, and control over knowledge. The Four Ages of Media illuminate our journey through print, electronic, digital, and now, artificial media.

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The Age of Print Media: The Written Word Rules the World

For centuries, print media reigned supreme. From Gutenberg’s press to the towering presses of modern newspapers, print democratized knowledge and reshaped civilizations. Books, newspapers, and pamphlets fueled revolutions (both intellectual and political), preserved culture, and built bridges between generations. Print media’s longevity lay in its permanence—words inked on a page endure, tethered to the physical world.

The Age of Print was one of deliberate thought. Writers crafted ideas carefully, editors scrutinized every word, and readers engaged deeply with texts. The act of reading was a linear journey, one where information unfolded gradually, allowing reflection and understanding. Print media fostered institutions of learning and expanded the boundaries of human thought—it was the Age of Enlightenment’s backbone, after all. But its reach was inherently limited by geography, literacy, and economics.

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The Age of Electronic Media: The Rise of Airwaves

In the early 20th century, the flicker of radio dials and the hum of cathode-ray tubes heralded the next great transformation. The Age of Electronic Media emerged, driven by the immediacy of sound and moving images. For decades, radio and television dominated the landscape, bringing stories, news, and entertainment into living rooms around the world.

Where print media demanded active engagement, electronic media shifted the audience toward passive consumption. Radio brought voices and music, collapsing distance into the intimate proximity of sound. Television added the visceral power of imagery, creating a shared cultural tapestry—one nightly broadcast at a time. Electronic media’s strength lay in its reach and immediacy. A presidential speech, a moon landing, a breaking news bulletin—all could be shared with millions in real time.

Neil Postman’s seminal book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), offered a scathing critique of this era. Postman argued that television, as a medium, fundamentally altered the way society processed information. Unlike print, which encouraged rational discourse and critical thinking, television prioritized entertainment over substance. Complex ideas were reduced to sound bites, and serious discourse was diluted by the demands of visual spectacle. Postman’s warning was clear: when a culture values amusement over depth, it risks losing its capacity for meaningful dialogue and informed decision-making. This critique remains a vital lens through which to view the transition from print to electronic media.

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The Age of Digital Media: The Internet’s Infinite Canvas

By the late 20th century, the flicker of screens shifted again—this time to computer monitors. The Age of Digital Media burst forth, powered by the internet’s boundless possibilities. For decades, computers and the web transformed the landscape of communication, introducing new paradigms of interaction, creativity, and knowledge-sharing.

Unlike its predecessors, digital media empowered users to become creators. Blogs, social media, video platforms, and podcasts democratized storytelling and shattered the gatekeeping of prior ages. Information became instantaneous, searchable, and hyperconnected. The digital age blurred the lines between creators and consumers, fostering participatory cultures and niche communities.

However, this era brought challenges as well. The velocity of information dissemination has outpaced truth and reflection. Echo chambers, misinformation, and the monetization of attention emerged as byproducts of this interconnected world. Postman’s critique of television as an entertainment-first medium found echoes in the digital age—though the internet allowed for instances of deeper engagement, its design often prioritized clicks, virality, and superficial interactions. Yet, the Age of Digital Media reshaped societies more profoundly than any medium before it, alternately empowering and entrapping individuals and decentralizing knowledge on a scale never seen before.

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The Age of Artificial Media: A New Dawn

And now, we stand at the precipice of the Fourth Age—the Age of Artificial Media. This is the age of AI-generated content, where algorithms compose music, craft stories, paint pictures, and generate video. Unlike prior ages, artificial media creates rather than transmits; it synthesizes rather than curates. In this age, media is no longer solely the product of human creativity but the collaboration between human intent and machine intelligence.

The implications are profound. AI can personalize content on an unprecedented scale, tailoring media to individual preferences and needs. News articles generated in seconds, novels crafted from simple prompts, or videos designed to cater to niche tastes—artificial media promises infinite variety and accessibility. It holds, as well, the potential to preserve and expand human creativity, augmenting artists and thinkers with tools that amplify their imagination.

Yet, this age raises fundamental questions about authenticity, ownership, and control. Who owns AI-generated content? How do we define originality in a world where machines remix existing works at lightning speed? And what does it mean for humanity if machines—once mere tools—begin to shape culture autonomously? Perhaps most concerning is the erosion of our ability to distinguish real from artificial. As AI-generated images and videos become indistinguishable from reality, the visual evidence that once anchored our understanding of truth becomes suspect. In a world where seeing is no longer believing, trust in media—and perhaps even in our perceptions—faces an unprecedented crisis.

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The Arc of Media History

The Four Ages of Media reflect humanity’s ever-expanding capacity to communicate and create. Each age builds upon the last, adding layers of complexity and accessibility. Print media laid the foundation for durable knowledge. Electronic media expanded reach and immediacy. Digital media democratized creation and connected the globe. Artificial media now stands poised to redefine the very nature of creativity itself.

Where this Fourth Age will take us remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: each transformation in media reflects not just technological change, but the evolution of human society and its boundless desire to connect, share, and understand.

We are the storytellers, the creators, and now the collaborators with machines in this new chapter of humanity’s narrative. The question we must ask is not only what artificial media can create, but how it can deepen our shared experience of being human—for all time.

Seen today via YouTube -- Understanding Pandeism: A Unique Philosophical Perspective

This vid, seen today on YouTube, is overall a wonderfully clear explanation of Pandeism, capturing its essence beautifully!! But a nuance worth adding is that insofar as miracles are, in fact, claimed to occur, Pandeism accounts for them through the divine nature embedded in our Universe itself as an underlying force that people may unwittingly tap into. Additionally missing is the profound purpose behind our Creator becoming our Universe -- to understand and experience the vast array of experiences which unfold within it, and amongst discrete lives in being therein. This purposeful journey of discovery and connection is a cornerstone of much pandeistic thought. Blessings!!

Beauty

'Beauty' is a puzzle. Though it is often framed as being a highly individualistic, 'in the eye of the beholder' sort of impression, experience certainly teaches that there are beauty standards -- things deemed desirable by any given general population. So then, what subtle forces contrive to dictate our deepest emotional reactions to a face, a flower, a painting, a sunset? Why is it that when we meet two people of indistinguishable personality, one may strike a spark in our hearts while the other simply does not register in that way, perhaps simply because of the shape of a chin or the width between the eyes? There are theories for all of these things -- that we have, perhaps, evolved an inclination towards being attracted to those traits or trails which best suit the survival of the species. Our bent, it is proposed, is towards finding lush green spaces beautiful for example because those are likely sources of food (though many would find as much beauty in cracked desert plains and solitary frozen ice floes).

But with respect to the sort of facial beauty which yields a physical, sexual attraction, the road may fall rather more narrowly. Here, the researchers speculate, attraction is all about a nagging desire to reproduce, and to do so in the way which will generate the most advantaged offspring. So here is where it gets interesting. After all, what exactly are the physical features most likely to yield offspring who will live to adulthood and outcompete their acquaintances in the reproduction contest? Why ought an oddly shaped nose or too much of a chin be off-putting in terms of the whole 'survival of the fittest' racket. Well it turns out that what makes somebody attractive tends to be their.... averageness.

Averageness and symmetry, indeed, go hand in hand on that score. Or, to be more exact, what tends to cause somebody to be deemed unattractive is their deviation from averageness and symmetry. Now this tends to be surprising because we often think of 'average' as a synonym for 'plain, but what is average and what is plain are not so aligned as one might think. There's an historical story here intertwined in the history of evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin, you see, was not the only scientifically minded member of family in his generation. Oh, you might think of his grandfather, good old Erasmus Darwin, but Charles had a cousin as well -- Francis Galton -- who invented 'composite photography' (that is, the laying of photographic images over one another to demonstrate a final image averaging the features of the initial ones). And in 1883, Galton set out to employ this technique in what he thought would be a crime-fighting endeavour. Specifically, Galton supposed that by taking many images of criminals and overlapping them, he could ultimately produce the image of the 'average criminal.' This, in turn, he thought would aid society in finding those with criminal features and identifying them before they engaged in nefarious deeds (all of this being in the age of phrenology, when it was believed that the bumps and knots of a person's skull provided details about their personality and characteristic tendencies). But as Galton put together more and more of these faces, he discovered the composite result to be not somebody looking more and more 'criminal,' but more and more conventionally attractive. And, indeed, further experimentation by Galton and by generations of later experimenters has repeatedly confirmed this, that if a random grouping of a few dozen or more randomly picked people from the population are image-composited, the 'average' person's face turn out a beauty.

The simple explanation of all this is that each face deviates from the average in some aspect or another, but most every faces deviates in a different way; and so, as more and more faces are composited together, any especial deviation displayed by one will be subdued by comparison to the others, which are free of that deviation. So, if one face has a very long nose, one too wide a brow, and one sunken cheekbones, the two faces with average noses will subdue the long nose, the two with average brows will subdue the wide brow, and the two with sharper cheekbones will subdue the sunken example. And indeed it goes beyond that, for a dozen faces with too-long noses composited with a dozen faces with too-short noses will yield one face with that perfectly average nose (and approaching perfect symmetry as well, for the same reasons). And in the same breath, since wrinkles and other signs of aging are not equally distributed amongst the aged, a composite of many people (even of many old people) will subdue all of these features, and end up looking youthful, smooth-skinned and vibrant. (Note that this effect is restricted by gender; mixing of genders yields androgynous faces, which are themselves a deviation from gender norms, and have generally been deemed unattractive by those surveyed).

So having gotten to that point, the question returns, what is the advantage of being most attracted to the person with the most average of faces? Well, it is always possible that any deviation from the average evidences a defect, a parting from the healthy biological norm. And so, though adhering to average faces causes the reproducing person to pass upon potentially beneficial evolutionary changes, it does so in the cause of keeping to the safest position, that of reproducing with the person least likely (based on outward appearance) to carry some harmful genetic quirk. And, just to provide an illustration to this principle, I went to faceresearch.org and generated some 'average' faces (try it yourself -- pick the twenty faces from one gender which you would find least attractive, and then see how those unattractive faces average out); and then uploaded those average specimens to morphthing.com, a site which allows you to create composite images of celebrities (and upload your own), and morphed dozens of Hollywood starlets and women similarly considered famously beautiful, and then morphed that into the other 'average' faces; then I put this in Photoshop and tinted the whole thing green for no especial reason, and got this face, for your consideration.

One of the startling discoveries man has made is that in taking a wide variety of faces -- all sorts of faces, the plain and typical and unremarkable, the quirky and unusual and memorable -- and 'morphing' them together to average out their features yields what people generally recognize as a strikingly attractive face. This is perhaps in part a consequence of the averaging out of asymmetry and the gradual elimination over every generation of morphing of every distinctive blemish, every outlier feature.

Consider this woman.  She does not exist. She is instead a carefully constructed average of sixty-four different actresses and models and other famously "attractive" women. Black, White, Asian, Latina, all went into the mix. Confessedly, none of them was green (that element was simply added to further remove the generated image from common notions of "race").

Embrace the Light

This is a new realm of experience for me -- and many others like me. There are now AI websites which allow you to generate music that, with a modicum of tweaking, sounds radio-ready. With one called Udio.com, I made the song below -- outside of any genre I have worked in before (and indeed, I played around with several before hitting upon the central structure of this one, and building out from there)

It it, in a word, transformative. Not the song, especially, but the technology behind it, and more impactfully perhaps, the experience of having no musical skills beyond being able to pluck a few notes, and yet being able to instantiate something like this. And remember, we are at the very beginning of this journey. We are Marconi's first fiddling with radio waves compared to where we will be just a few years from now.

Along the way, enjoy the music!!

#AI #Music #AIArt #AIMusic #TheFutureIsNow

Record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page, redux

Some three years ago I blogged about record traffic on Wikipedia's Pandeism page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandeism -- observing then that the page had hit an all-time high in daily page views at 1,227 (part of a pattern in which several of the highest-viewed days were scattered over a surrounding period of weeks). That spike was a mystery, the previous record of 901 views having been attributable to Pandeism being mentioned in an article in Scientific American.

Well, all that is now water under the bridge insofar as record page view days go.

For on February 26, 2023, a new page views record of 2,231 nearly doubled the old record, and was followed by a day of 1,483 views (itself exceeding the record set in 2020), followed by a day of 1,162 (with this whole run being preceded by a day of 906 views).

Well it seems that all of this is because of cartoonist Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays on Twitter) making news (in a very negative way, unfortunately).

You see, one of Adams' more archaic claims to fame is having written the book God's Debris (actually a quite incisive work which I still put forth as recommend reading) describing a school of Pandeism as its worldview. Interestingly, a key point of Pandeism -- that we are all equally fragments of our Creator, and how we treat our fellows is how we contribute to creating the experience of our Creator -- ought to strongly motivate seeking to help all humans to overcome whatever barriers separate us, for the  common achievement of greater joy in our lives.

Now then, I wouldn't especially want the hundreds-of-years-old theological theory of Pandeism to be drawing attention solely due to an association with a person who's in the news for all the wrong reasons. But.... if even a handful of Wikipedia visitors are enlightened by it, well, you know the old saw, The Universe Works in Mysterious Ways. Perhaps one of those mysterious ways is to make a current celebrity act in such a way that they unintentionally draw attention to a theory they espoused in the past perhaps much more beautiful than what they espouse in the present.

Pandeism has steadily been gaining renewed interest for the past decade, so anything which informs people that the idea exists is doing them a service, perhaps offering a light to come out of shadowy events.

Pandeism: An Anthology -- five reviews, five stars every time!!

This one has been sitting in my outbox for five years....

An old favorite....

 

How accurately human of a conception this is....