Page 11 - Introducing The Gratitudes

“People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten.
Do good anyway.
Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.“
- Mother Theresa
the average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of informa- tion. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.
“But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos. If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we are faced with: In America, there are 260,000 bill- boards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video out- lets for renting tapes; 362 million tv sets; and over 400 million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 world-wide) and every day in
11
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
America 41 million photographs are
taken, and just for the record, over 60
billion pieces of advertising junk mail
come into our mail boxes every year.
Everything from telegraphy and pho-
tography in the 19th century to the sili-
con chip in the twentieth has amplified
the din of information, until matters
have reached such proportions today
that for the average person, information no longer has any rela- tion to the solution of problems.”
Postman wrote this in the early 1980s, a decade before the launch of the Internet, and 30 years before the world of Twitter and Facebook and the billions upon billions of daily posts and tweets and emails and pictures that deluge us every day. We can only im- agine what he would have made of that, but we can get a clue when he states:
“The tie between information and action has been severed. In- formation is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to en- hance one’s status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don’t know what to do with it.”
Postman describes elsewhere how the Benedictine monks who invented the mechanical clock in the 12th and 13th centuries be- lieved that such a clock would provide a precise regularity to the seven periods of devotion they were required to observe during the course of the day. It did. But what the monks did not realize is that the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. And so, by the middle of the 14th century, the clock had moved out- side the walls of the monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the workman and the merchant. The me- chanical clock made possible the idea of regular production, regu- lar working hours, and a standardized product. Without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible.
The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one’s status.