Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Mittelmaß und Wahn. Gesammelte
Zerstreuungen. Frankfurt am Main: 1988.
Norbert Wiener. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and
Society. 1st ed. New York: Avon Books, 1967.
Wiener was very concerned with the consequences of human
involvement with machines and the consequences of the
unreflecting use of technology. "Once before in history the
machine had impinged upon human culture with an effect of the
greatest moment. This previous impact is known as the Industrial
Revolution, and it concerned the machine purely as an alternative
to human muscle" (p.185).
"It is fair to say, however, that except for a considerable
number of isolated examples, this industrial revolution up to
present [ca. 1950] has displaced man and beast as a source of
power, without making any great impression on other human
functions" (p. 209).
Wiener goes on to describe a new stage, what he calls the Second
Industrial Revolution, dominated by computing machines driving
all kinds of industrial processes. He notes: "Let us remember
that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it
may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of
slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must
accept the economic conditions of slave labor" (p. 220).
"What can we expect of its economic and social consequences? In
the first place, we can expect an abrupt and final cessation of
the demand for the type of factory labor performing purely
repetitive tasks. In the long run, the deadly uninteresting
nature of the repetitive task may make this a good thing and the
source of leisure necessary for a man's full cultural
development. It may also produce cultural results as trivial and
wasteful as the greater part of those so far obtained from the
radio and the movies" (p. 219).
Nick Thimmesch, editor. Aliteracy. People Who Can Read but Won't.
Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Policy
Research, 1983. Proceedings of a conference held on September 20,
1982 in Washington, DC.
According to William A. Baroody, Jr., President of the American
Enterprise Institute, the aliterate person scans magazines,
reads headlines, "never reads novels or poetry for the pleasures
they offer." He goes on to state that aliteracy is more
dangerous because it "reflects a change in cultural values and a
loss of skills" and "leads to knowing without understanding."
Marsha Levine, a participant in the conference noted that
although educators are concerned with universal literacy, many
people read less or not at all: "A revolution in technology is
having an impact on education...they [technological means]
increase the level of literacy, but they might undermine the
practice of what they teach."
At the same conference, an anonymous participant posed a sequence
of questions: "Exactly what advantage do reading and literacy
hold in terms of helping us to process information? What does
reading give us that is of some social advantage that cannot be
obtained through other media? Is it entirely certain that we
cannot have a functioning society with an oral-aural method of
communication, where we use television and its still unexploited
resources of communication? [...] Is it impossible to conceive of
a generation that has received its knowledge of the world and
itself through television?" (p. 22).
John Searle. The storm over the university, in The New York
Review of Books, 37:19, December 6, 1990, pp. 34-42.
Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters. Trans.
Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.
In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments
against writing: "It will implant forgetfulness in their souls
[of people, M.N.]: they will cease to exercise memory because
they rely on that which is written, calling these things to
remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of
external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon,
a potion; some translate it as recipe, M.N.] not for memory, but
for reminder" (274-278e. p. 96). (References to Plato include the
Stephanus numbers. This makes them independent of the particular
edition used by the reader.)
Claude Lévi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1967.
The author continues Socrates' thought: "It [writing] seems to
have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their
enlightenment" (p. 298).
From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence
of writing and early written documents, the following proved
useful in defining the position stated in this book:
John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk.
Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1989.
David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors.
Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of
Reading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer
to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee.
Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions,
1986.
Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of the
TV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991.
Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems
and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling.
Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.
Dr. Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift.
Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1990.
David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind.
3rd edition. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.
Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford
University Press, 1987.
Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden:
Brandsetter, 1963.
Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: Taplinger
Publishing Co., 1981.
Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer.
Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974.
Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: Academic
Press, 1976.
Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of
Printing 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976.
Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY:
Association for Education in Journalism, 1972.
Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York:
Knopf, 1970.
C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look. An expanded
version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.
Cambridge: At the University Press, 1959.
John Brockman. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific
Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
A recent criticism of the book, by Phillip E. Johnson, on the
World Wide Web, states that the scientists contributing to the
book "tend to replace the literary intellectuals rather than
cooperate with them."
Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987.
Antoine de St. Exupéry. The Little Prince. Trans. Katherine
Woods. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943.
Helmut Schmidt, ex-Chancellor of West Germany, Marion Gräfin
Dönhoff, editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Edzard Reuter, ex-CEO of
Daimler-Benz, along with several prominent German intellectuals
and politicians, met during the summer of 1992 to discuss issues
facing their country after reunification. In their Manifesto,
they insisted that any concept for a sensible future needs to
integrate the notion of renouncing (Verzicht) and sharing as
opposed to growing expectations and their export through economic
aid to Third World countries. See Ein Manifest: Weil das Land
sich ändern muß (A Manifesto. Because the country needs to
change), Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag, 1992
Jean-Marie Guéhenno. La Fin de la Démocratie. Paris: Flammarion,
1993.
Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld. New York:
Outerbridge and Dienstfrey/Ballantine, 1970.
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Earth's Holocaust, in The Complete Short
Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co.,
1959.
George Steiner. The end of bookishness? in Times Literary
Supplement, July 8-14, 1988.
"To read classically means to own the means of that reading. We
are dealing no longer with the medieval chained library or with
books held as treasures in certain monastic and princely
institutions. The book became a domestic object owned by its
user, accessible at his will for re-reading. This access in turn
comprised private space, of which the personal libraries of
Erasmus and of Montaigne are emblematic. Even more crucial,
though difficult to define, was the acquisition of periods of
private silence" (p. 754).
Thomas Robert Malthus. An Essay On the Principle of Population,
1798, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. E.A. Wrigley and
David Souden, editors. London: W. Pickering, 1986.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemens). The Annotated Huckleberry
Finn: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With introduction,
notes, and bibliography by Michael P. Hearn. New York: C.N.
Potter and Crown Publishers, 1981.
"Twain drives home just how strongly we are chained to our own
literacy through Huck's illiterate silence" (p. 101). "Thus
Twain brings into focus the trap of literacy. There is a whole
world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy.
They can't, for ironic example, read this marvelous work, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And yet we must recognize a world
rich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty,
that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to
letters" (p. 105).
George Gilder. Life After Television: The Coming Transformation
of Media and American Life. New York: Norton, 1992.
Neil Postman. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to
Technology. New York: Knopf, 1992.