It Is Inescapable That Every Culture Must

Through The Computer, The Heralds Say, We Will Make Education Better, Religion Better, Politics Better, Our Minds Better — Best Of All, Ourselves Better. This Is, Of Course, Nonsense, And Only The Young Or The Ignorant Or The Foolish Could Believe It.

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?

Television Is A Non Graded Curriculum And Excludes No Viewer For Any Reason, At Any Time. In Other Words, In Doing Away Wtih The Idea Of Sequenece And Continuity In Education, Television Undermines The Idea That Sequence And Continuity Have Anything To Do With Thought Itself.

But It Is Much Later In The Game Now, And Ignorance Of The Score Is Inexcusable. To Be Unaware That A Technology Comes Equipped With A Program For Social Change, To Maintain That Technology Is Neutral, To Make The Assumption That Technology Is Always A Friend To Culture Is, At This Late Hour, Stupidity Plain And Simple.

When A Population Becomes Distracted By Trivia, When Cultural Life Is Redefined As A Perpetual Round Of Entertainments, When Serious Public Conversation Becomes A Form Of Baby-talk, When, In Short, A People Become An Audience, And Their Public Business A Vaudeville Act, Then A Nation Finds Itself At Risk; Culture-death Is A Clear Possibility.