Date:    Sun, 4 Dec 1994 01:29:53 -0500
From:    Interpersonal Computing and Technology <IPCT@GUVAX.BITNET>
Subject: A long, not so gentle reminder

From: "Gerald M. Phillips, Ph.D." <GMP@PSUVM.PSU.EDU>

Thought you folks might be interested in this quote....short enoug
to be protected by "fair use.

  - - The original note follows - -



"...Well, I'd say it really got started around the time of a thing called
the Civil War....The fact is we didn't get along well until photography
came into its own. Then - motion pictures in the early twentieth century
Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.
And because they had mass, they became simpler. Once, books appealed to
few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different.
The world was roomy. But then the world got full eyes and elbows and
mouths. Double, triple, qaudruple population. Films and radios,
magazines, books leveled down to a pastepudding norm, do you follow me
Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow
motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut
shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils dow to th
gag, the snap ending.

Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a
two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- to twelve-line
dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for
reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of _Hamlet_ was a on
page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the
classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery
into the college nd back to the nursery; there's your intellectual
pattern for the last five centuries or more.

Speed up the film, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There,
Swift, Pace, Up, Dow, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang!
Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests. Digest-digest-digests.
Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all
vanishes! Whirl man's min around so fast under the pumping hands of
publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off al
unnecessary, time-wasting thought!

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories,
languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finall
almost completely ignored. Life isimmediate, the job counts, pleasurelies
all about after work. Why learn anything, save pressing buttons, flipping
switches, fitting nuts and bolts
More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think
eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More
cartoons in books. More books. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience
Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere.
The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges
from place to place, following the moon tides, living in the room where
you slept this noon and I the night before.
Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? bigger the
population, the more the minorities. Don't step on the toes of dog lovers,
Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation, Chinese, Swedes,
Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, or people from Oregon
or Mexico.The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not mean
to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics and anywhere
the bigger your market, the less you handle controversy, remember that
All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean.
Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did
Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned
snobbish critics said, were dishwasher. No wonder books stopped selling,
the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinnin
happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex
magazines, of course. There you have it. It didn't come from the
government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to
start with, no!Technology, massy exploitation, minority pressure, carried
the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the
time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trad
journals.



Excerpted from _Farenheit 451_ by Ray Bradbury, 1953
Submitted by GMP