Amnesia

The situation is this: our lifespans create a partial social amnesia, in that, while we have other documentation of the past, living memories of events are limited to the generation of humans presently alive on this planet. This prevents us from getting a clear picture of how the human condition has changed over the course of our history and in particular in the very recent past (i.e. the modern era and beyond). Really only for the past century, out of three million years of human history, has media had such a pervasive role in our lives. But our individual memories don’t extend back even that far, and this fog, this inability to directly compare the conditions of our existence from era to era, blinds us to the reality that our technologies and our media fundamentally change what it is to be a human being, almost always for the worse.

Transcript (with citations) available at asatanistreadsthebible.com