Thamus would approve

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." - Thomas Jefferson

***

A special report on television: An interactive future | The Economist

"NOT so long ago television was scary. It was held to turn children into imbeciles, make men violent and corrupt political discourse. Books tried to alert people to the menace in their living rooms: the best of them was Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, published in 1985. Musicians vilified TV in songs like “She Watch Channel Zero” and “Television, the Drug of the Nation”.

These days newspapers are filled with tales of Facebook stalkers, Craigslist killers, cyber-bullying, sexting and screen addiction. E-mail, blogs and YouTube, not television, are held responsible for the degradation of politics (though American liberals make an exception for the Fox News Channel). As the internet grabs attention, television has become more pitied than feared. A Google search on the phrase “threat from television” turns up some 500 results, many of them historical. “Threat to television” generates eight times as many."


From a review of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:

"In giving credence only to those studies which bolster his argument and dismissing all others, Postman proves nothing other than that television does have some effect on viewers, which he considers negative... Postman provides little in the way of real-world evidence that television has damaged America’s body politic... Anyone choosing to utilize one of the virtues Postman attributes to books might well pause to consider the place of television in social movements of the late twentieth century"


"[Max] Nordau... considered the vast increase in numbers of degenerates in his day to have arisen from the tempo of 19th century living... The telegraph, a surfeit of newspapers, mass literacy... left much of humanity fatigued and exhausted. For Nordau, life was too frenzied to be appreciated, and the overstimulation of the senses was producing mass degeneracy"

--- The unfit: a history of a bad idea / Elof Axel Carlson


"Edward Bulwer-Lytton... argues that diffusing knowledge inevitably dilutes it. Noting “the profusion of amusing, familiar, and superficial writings” in the early thirties, Bulwer-Lytton adds: "People complain of it, as if it were a proof of degeneracy in the knowledge of authors—it is a proof of the increased number of readers” (294). While the growth of the reading public is a sure sign of “the progress to perfection” (223), that growth nevertheless causes a decline in the general profundity and literary greatness of the culture of any nation in which it occurs. “Thus, if we look abroad, in France, where the reading public is less numerous than in England, a more elevated and refining tone is more fashionable in literature; and in America, where it is infinitely larger, the tone of literature is infinitely more superficial” (294). The nation fortunate enough to achieve mass literacy on its route to social perfection will simultaneously witness the decline and perhaps extinction of cultural excellence and creativity. In his chapter surveying the state of education in England, Bulwer-Lytton admonishes: "As you diffuse the stream, guard well the fountains” (165)."

--- The reading lesson: the threat of mass literacy in nineteenth-century British fiction / Patrick Brantlinger


Addendum: Keywords - phaedrus