We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the transformative power of new technologies and the implications on perception and reality.
Grant Morrison's quote speaks to the dynamic shift in power dynamics influenced by technology, where a new generation, equipped with powerful tools like cameras and microchips, challenges and potentially replaces established norms and authority. It highlights the role of technology in shaping our understanding of reality, where the ability to document and manipulate information fundamentally alters how we perceive the world around us.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of technology on society, you could quote this to illustrate the shift towards a digital age.
A comic will always be more 'personal' than a DVD or CD, both of which require electronic 'players' to decode their content. With comics, the reader is the player so the engagement with the material is always more fundamental and dynamic. Reading comics is a much less passive activity than consuming CDs and DVDs.
American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.
Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.
I'm the evil mastermind behind the scenes. I'm the wicked puppeteer who pulls the strings and makes you dance. I'm your writer.
Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.
A cannon fires only once but words detonate across centuries
We aren't in an information age, we are in an entertainment age.
What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.
It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.
The internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.
As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.
Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet, and they are at odds with authoritarianism.
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