Certainty Abolishes Hope, And Robs Us Of

I Do Not Mean To Imply That Television News Deliberately Aims To Deprive Americans Of A Coherent, Contextual Understanding Of Their World. I Mean To Say That When News Is Packaged As Entertainment, That Is The Inevitable Result. And In Saying That The Television News Show Entertains But Does Not Inform, I Am Saying Something Far More Serious Than That We Are Being Deprived Of Authentic Information. I Am Saying We Are Losing Our Sense Of What It Means To Be Well Informed.

By Itself Photography Cannot Deal With The Unseen, The Remote, The Internal, The Abstract, It Does Not Speak Of Man, Only Of A Man ; Not Of Tree, Only A Tree.

People Like Ourselves May See Nothing Wondrous In Writing, But Our Anthropologists Know How Strange And Magical It Appears To A Purely Oral People - A Conversation With No One And Yet With Everyone. What Could Be Stranger Than The Silence One Encounters When Addressing A Question To A Text? What Could Be More Metaphysically Puzzling Than Addressing An Unseen Audience, As Every Writer Of Books Must Do? And Correcting Oneself Because One Knows That An Unknown Reader Will Disapprove Or Misunderstand?

Anyone Who Has Studied The History Of Technology Knows That Technological Change Is Always A Faustian Bargain: Technology Giveth And Technology Taketh Away, And Not Always In Equal Measure. A New Technology Sometimes Creates More Than It Destroys. Sometimes, It Destroys More Than It Creates. But It Is Never One-sided. The Invention Of The Printing Press Is An Excellent Example. Printing Fostered The Modern Idea Of Individuality But It Destroyed The Medieval Sense Of Community And Social Integration.

The Price Of Maintaining Membership In The Establishment Is Unquestioning Acceptance Of Authority.