“The current American relationship
to reading and writing … is best described not as illiterate but as a-literate,”
Susan Jacoby wrote in “Age of American Unreason.”
“That Americans inhabit a less
contemplative and judicious society than they did just four decades ago is
arguable only to the ever-expanding group of infotainment marketers who stand
to profit from the videoization of everything. The greater accessibility of
information through computers and the internet serves to foster the illusion
that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also
confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth,
lies or something in between.
“The illusion is not of course
confined to America, but its effects are especially deleterious in a culture
(unlike, say, that of France or Japan) with an endemic predilection for
technological answers to non-technological problems and an endemic suspicion of
anything that smacks of intellectual elitism.”
No comments:
Post a Comment