Page 10 - Introducing The Gratitudes

10 man See, whereas in fact, it turned out to bring a revolution which
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
destroyed the monopoly of the Catholic Church in Europe. Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to fa- vour some groups of people and harms other groups. School teach- ers, for example, will, in the long run, probably be made obsolete by Internet, as blacksmiths were made obsolete by the automo- bile, as balladeers were made obsolete by the printing press. Tech- nological change, in other words, always results in winners and
losers.
American author Neil Postman, in his 1985 book Amusing Our-
What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.
selves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in his books Animal Farm and 1984, in which totalitar- ian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate them- selves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacri- ficing their rights:
“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspi- cion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conver- sation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people be- come an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”
Postman alerts us to the real and present dangers of this state of affairs, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught. Before we hand over politics, education, re- ligion, and journalism to the shallow show-business demands of the telemedia age, we must recognize the ways in which the me- dia shape our lives:
“There was a time when information was a resource that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their en- vironment. It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both impor- tant and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an information explosion. Forty years after the invention of the press, there were printing machines in 110 cities in six different countries; 50 years after, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously not been available to