As A Culture Moves From

Nothing Could Be More Misleading Than The Idea That Computer Technology Introduced The Age Of Information. The Printing Press Began That Age, And We Have Not Been Free Of It Since.

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.

Television Screens Saturated With Commercials Promote The Utopian And Childish Idea That All Problems Have Fast, Simple, And Technological Solutions. You Must Banish From Your Mind The Naive But Commonplace Notion That Commercials Are About Products. They Are About Products In The Same Sense That The Story Of Jonah Is About The Anatomy Of Whales.

We Had Learned How To Invent Things, And The Question Of Why We Invent Things Receded In Importance. The Idea That If Something Could Be Done It Should Be Done Was Born In The Nineteenth Century. And Along With It, There Developed A Profound Belief In All The Principles Through Which Invention Succeeds: Objectivity, Efficiency, Expertise, Standardization, Measurement, And Progress. It Also Came To Be Believed That The Engine Of Technological Progress Worked Most Efficiently When People Are Conceived Of Not As Children Of God Or Even As Citizens But As Consumers-that Is To Say, As Markets.

For In The End, He Was Trying To Tell Us What Afflicted The People In 'brave New World' Was Not That They Were Laughing Instead Of Thinking, But That They Did Not Know What They Were Laughing About And Why They Had Stopped Thinking.