[it] Is Not That Television Is Entertaining

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.

Embedded In Every Technology There Is A Powerful Idea, Sometimes Two Or Three Powerful Ideas. Like Language Itself, A Technology Predisposes Us To Favor And Value Certain Perspectives And Accomplishments And To Subordinate Others. Every Technology Has A Philosophy, Which Is Given Expression In How The Technology Makes People Use Their Minds, In How It Codifies The World, In Which Of Our Senses It Amplifies, In Which Of Our Emotional And Intellectual Tendencies It Disregards.

The Way In Which The Photograph Records Experience Is Also Different From The Way Of Language. Language Makes Sense Only When It Is Presented As A Sequence Of Propositions. Meaning Is Distorted When A Word Or Sentence Is, As We Say, Taken Out Of Context; When A Reader Or Listener Is Deprived Of What Was Said Before, And After. But There Is No Such Thing As A Photograph Taken Out Of Context, For A Photograph Does Not Require One. In Fact, The Point Of Photography Is To Isolate Images From Context, So As To Make Them Visible In A Different Way.

When Two Human Beings Get Together, They're Co-present, There Is Built Into It A Certain Responsibility We Have For Each Other, And When People Are Co-present In Family Relationships And Other Relationships, That Responsibility Is There. You Can't Just Turn Off A Person. On The Internet, You Can.

My Argument Is Limited To Saying That A Major New Medium Changes The Structure Of Discourse; It Does So By Encouraging Certain Uses Of The Intellect, By Favoring Certain Definitions Of Intelligence And Wisdom, And By Demanding A Certain Kind Of Content - In A Phrase, By Creating New Forms Of Truth-telling.