People are more likely to search for specific books in which they are actively interested and that justify all of that effort of r...eading them. Electronic images and sounds, however, thrust themselves into people's environments, and the messages are received with little effort. In a sense, people must go after print messages, but electronic messages reach out and touch people. People will expose themselves to information in electronic media that they would never bother to read about in a book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer g...oing to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old- fashioned machine, it e...nshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one si...de won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall w...as opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produc...ed Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is never finality in the display terminal's screen, but an irresponsible whimsicality, as words, sentences, and paragraphs a...re negated at the touch of a key. The significance of the past, as expressed in the manuscript by a deleted word or an inserted correction, is annulled in idle gusts of electronic massacre.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to ju...stify literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not too many years ago, a child's experience was limited by how far he or she could ride a bicycle or by the physical boundaries t...hat parents set. Today ... the real boundaries of a child's life are set more by the number of available cable channels and videotapes, by the simulated reality of videogames, by the number of megabytes of memory in the home computer. Now kids can go anywhere, as long as they stay inside the electronic bubble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation...; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »