there was no TV etc ~300,000+ years ago, in the ancestral environment, the environments of evolutionary adaptation, or whatever you want call it, whenever it was exactly, or inexactly. I can’t say for certain when, so I made a time up. It’s no worse than saying I learnt to tie my shoe laces before I went to school. I don’t know exactly when, but it happened.

anyway, my question is of confusing immediacy with proximity. Stuff that happens near is near, my ancestors sorted that out quite fast, you know if you can see it happening it’s happening, the relevance (or not) of it was in great part determined by proximity, how near it was, it’s immediate (now) too if it’s happening in front of you. That doesn’t mean an observer might be inclined to make much of it, it could be just two dogs fucking

some people aren’t fond of the idea human minds evolved to solve types of problems their ancestors were presented with in environments past, way back, that there is structure in the mind tools representative of that. That it limits and distorts (shapes) the way humans think, they’d rather believe whatever fluid intelligence magically understands anything and everything (of human behavior, and environments), somehow the human cognitive apparatus is an open-ended understanding machine

my argument is the sensation of immediacy (now, or now-nearness) provided by media is confused with proximity (physical nearness), and it’s exploited every moment you watch the moving picture box (with sound), or rectangle on the wall, computer or whatever

evolution certainly hasn’t had time to evolve a cognitive apparatus to deal with this

you could see something in your social media feed, respond partly as if it was happening on your doorstep, when it’s otherside the world. You forget momentarily it’s not happening on your doorstep because it’s not on your doorstep, and many things make it unlikely to ever happen on your doorstep because immediacy is not (always) the same thing as proximity, or more to point it need not be. Plenty of distance between things limits cause and effect, the likelihood of certain things happening

so i’m thinking media is fucked, it’s increasingly reporting what it in large part inspires, creating its own news, to some extent, courtesy 300,000 year old mind tools

History of the Television
https://bebusinessed.com/history/history-of-the-television/

1800’s mechanically scanning images

In 1907, two inventors – Russian Boris Rosing and English A.A. Campbell-Swinton – combined a cathode ray tube with a mechanical scanning system to create a totally new television system.

In 1927 The world’s first electronic television was created by a 21 year old inventor named Philo Taylor Farnsworth. That inventor lived in a house without electricity until he was age 14. Starting in high school, he began to think of a system that could capture moving images, transform those images into code, then move those images along radio waves to different devices.

Yes, a lot of media is trash.