09-28-2021, 12:02 AM
I'm not sure that the technologies that we get themselves imply great breaks from old practices. Telegrams replaced messengers; telephone calls supplanted telegrams; my use of e-mail is practically a reversion to telegraphy. Getting around lower Manhattan by car is now slower than it was by horse and carriage 140 years ago. Much of early television was really vaudeville, with Carol Burnett as possibly its last exponent. Much else was live sports, which means that instead of having an announcer simply talking into a microphone ("Ted Williams digs in at the plate; here's the wind-up by (Whitey) Ford, and... it's a hard drive into the center-right gap. Mantle plays the carom off the wall, and Williams reaches second)" some people have cameras going.
Human character changes much less than one might expect, and technology more responds to it than shapes it.
Human character changes much less than one might expect, and technology more responds to it than shapes it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.