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Paraguayo HFD
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It is sobering to reflect that during the next decade, as baby boomers born before 1955 (even politicians) enter retirement, that the political and cultural leadership of the nation will inevitably pass to the first generation raised on television from Day 1. They are already being joined by the first generation raised on computers from Day 1. This prospect is unsettling for those of us who doubt that any attempts to add more “quality” programming to either the old television or new digital menu can ever offset the negative intellectual impact of sheer quantity. This view was first expressed by Neil Postman in his prescient 1985 jeremiad, Amusing Ourselves to Death. “I raise no objection to television’s junk,” Postman declared unequivocally. “The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.”7
Postman was writing at the dawn of the era of personal computers and just before various taping devices, beginning with the VCR, became a fixture in homes and made it possible for entertainment consumers to acquire a virtually limitless stock of visual images for home viewing at their leisure. Everything he had to say about the implications of the shift from a print to a video culture is valid today—only more so. Postman’s argument that the quantity of viewing is more important than quality applies to millennials who, though they prefer mobile devices for many purposes, also watch plenty of television programs on various screens. I completely agree with Postman on this issue. ..--Susan Jacoby, The Way We Live Now
...We must be more than a nation of functional literates. We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies. Nothing less will satisfy the needs of the world that is coming...--Charles Von Doren and Mortimer J. Adler, How To Read a Book
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