Sometimes I feel that people these days are not nearly as capable of scholarly reflection and thinking as those of previous generations. My thinking, as it goes, is that the bombardment that we receive from mass media combined with the ubiquitous convenience of the internet has turned many of us into a bunch of short-attention-spanned Eloi.
For that matter, why read a book when you could be watching youtube? Anything you think of can be in front of you as fast as you can type it. If a video isn't on the site yet, chances are it will be eventually, and in the meantime, there is always the surprised kitty: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bmhjf0rKe8
Moreover, to take this line of thought a bit further, why draw a picture when you could be going out with your friends, taking pictures, and posting them on a social networking site? In many ways, it is as though we are becoming cast members in a self-made reality television show, where we post our own pictures, write our own thoughts, and 'add' other cast members as we meet them. I don't think I have seen a word for this concept, but perhaps we could pervert the word 'television' into a verb, as in, we are now spending a large part of our days 'televising' ourselves through new media.
On the other hand, I can still remember back in the 20th century, people lived the majority of their lives in real life, and at times they did a lot of things in real life. Take for example, Edwin O. Reischauer.
Born in Tokyo to missionary parents, Professor Reischauer attended school in Japan during his childhood and grew up in close contact with Japanese culture. For university, he studied at Oberlin, and then moved to Harvard for postgraduate study, during which time he also studied in Beijing and in Europe. During World War II, he decoded Japanese military transmissions for the United States in Washington DC, and eventually he became the US Ambassador to Japan under the Kennedy administration. After his retirement from the Ambassador post, he returned to the United States and continued to teach at Harvard until the 1980s.
The accomplishments of Professor Reischauer were great, both in the scholarly field and in international diplomacy. However, what this book brings out more than anything is his incredible perspective on US-Japan and US-China relations. For Japan, the professor advocated a more independent and self-defended Japan, and a lower US base presence there. For China, he felt that a more congenial approach to the PRC-US relationship would help to lessen tensions, a change which eventually happened under the Nixon administration, leading to the beginning of a massive change in world geopolitics which continues into the present. The account of Professor Reischauer's life in such interesting times causes the reader to stop and wonder if events occurring today are not worthy of a similar level of attention.
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