More signs of cultural decline in America

I know, they are all around. Here's the latest:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26852192/vp/29975490#29975490
where a cool young hipster mocks the latest robotics advance from Japan which he calls "completely impractical, totally useless" and implicitly mocks it as ridiculous looking.

It's a robot which walks (Asimo) and is controlled by the brain waves of a person sitting in a chair. One does not need to be much of a technophile to see the possibilities. Think people who are paralyzed. It really does not take much creativity to imagine all sorts of important things coming out of this research.

But to the Geist all that matters is that it looks really geeky and on a superficial level that makes it easy fodder for mocking.

You can just imagine the Geist switching verbal gears to talk about something really important such as some athlete "making history" by scoring a lot of points (or something like that). You can imagine him being serious.

If we go back to 1900 or so we see an utterly different America one in thrall of progress and technology, a nation that elevated men like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell to status levels not approached by any athlete of the time. That was a reflection of what was considered important vs. what was basically seen as play.

Oh boy have the roles reversed in 100 years!

Recall that those two were basically nerds first, businessmen later. Point is they were not famous because of the money they made but famous for the things they created. We cannot really compare a Bill Gates with those two. Gates is a businessman. He is famous for making a titanic amount of money. Gates has invented nothing. He has taken things invented by others (for example a "windowed" graphical user interface - which was invented by Xerox at PARC) and "mass produced" them. Gates is more like Henry Ford.

The fact is that culturally we have no one like Edison or Bell today. America is a different kind of country now and no longer elevates such people to the kind of status that they once had.

How many Americans have heard of Tim Berners-Lee.

Another nation (an empire really) was a rival to America then and in some ways was culturally similar to the America of today. The Spanish empire was not embracing the new technology of the time but living in a past of "honor" and "chivalry" and had elaborate codes of behavior to reinforce class divisions. Basically they (the upper class anyway) were into riding horses, fencing and looking good while America was into building and inventing.

We know which direction each went.

Now China awards their top undergraduate geeks with $250,000 grants and top PHD's of course get even more. They deliberately make them into stars. America heaps such large rewards exclusively on athletes and movie stars. No mere student at an American university will even approach the status, money and perks heaped on the athletic class. No mere "inventor" in America can approach the status level of a Paris Hilton.

But in 1900 it was the Spanish who thought the first prototype airplanes being built in America (and France) looked oh-so-rediculous.