Belief that where there is a problem, there must be a solution, I shall conclude with the following suggestions. We must, as a start, not delude ourselves with preposterous notions such as the straigh...
What’s wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technologies
Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it...
Parents embraced Sesame Street for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children’s access to television. Sesame Street...
It would be a serious mistake to think of Billy Graham or any other television revivalist as a latter-day Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney. Edwards was one of the most brilliant and creative minds e...
It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions
It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in...
But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.
As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor.
The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.
With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them...
The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in fron...
Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages in-sensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is importa...
People of a television culture need plain language both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been lar...
Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a com...
Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.
An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate.
There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque. No
Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getti...
Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question...