🚀 go-pugleaf

Lyle Seaman (I think) writes:
  If you say "mostly illiterate", might be.  But look at it this way.
   ** Why do we consider literacy a good thing? **
  Well, it allows one-to-many information transfer, asynchronously,
  which is crucial for communication, education, modern business, etc.
  But is literacy *intrinsically* good?  I think not.  If another
  technology comes along and replaces written language, then it will
  only be because it is *more useful* than written language.
====================

The thing that concerns me about this statement is that it doesn't
address the question: More useful to whom?  Taking television as an
example, the question has two answers: Television is useful to
advertisers and to governments (the former mostly in the USA, the
latter in many other countries).  Television (in its current form) has
definite disadvantages as a communications medium (limited access,
passive reception, a strong tendency to trivialize everything it
touches), yet it is the most popular medium in the U.S. apart from
speech.  (In some families it even supplants that....)

Television has broken many promises.  It was supposed to educate; in
the U.S. it undermines education.  It was supposed to create a sort of
global village that everyone can participate in; it has homogenized
our culture without increasing our ability to affect one another as
individuals.  By some sort of process that nobody forsaw, its prime
purpose is now to attract viewers.  Anything that does not perform
sufficiently well in meeting that demand falls by the wayside.

There is no guarantee that any change, technological or otherwise,
will be an ``advance.''  
--
Fred Gilham    gilham@csl.sri.com 
"The culture of any period is a mixture of that which docilely caters
to passing whims and fancies and that which transcends these things --
and may also pass judgement on them."  -- Stanislaw Lem