People of the Screen

I suppose he was one of these college professors who has smelled his own intellectual gas for so long that he taken leave of his senses.

At the World Future Society Conference, at a session about the demise of the written word and the rise of the image, an older professor from a California University was arguing that since 98% of the people in developing countries are illiterate (1 billion people), we should ignore the goal of literacy and then move forward to utilizing technology (i.e. smart phones) to communicate verbal information audibly and symbolically through pictures and videos to them. He argued that the written word is unimportant as a philosophical postulation, not just a practical problem that cannot be solved considering resources.

I don't want to be uncharitable but this is idiocy by any name. Consign these cultures to perpetual intellectual infancy. This professor had a Rousseau-like noble savage "Tabula Rasa" belief in the innate superiority in the type of learning a baby does of touching, talking, hearing, and moving. Dr. Goo-Goo. It seems hardly worth my time to try and further prove the efficacy of reading. Some things are just self-evident to all but the ignorant.

Here is the ironic part...the college professor was handing out his new book to selected attenders about his postulations and theories. I suspect he is quite a reader himself. I "won" a copy but passed. I could not affirm by acquisition the terrible contradiction. If it wasn't so sad, I would think it high satire.

Here is a novel suggestion...how about using technology to teach people to read? No problem to employ technology to convey oral and visual information. Yet, we do a massive disservice, and the work of the Devil (one who disguises himself as an angel of light. i.e. image), if our ultimate effect is only to reinforce illiteracy and its mathematical equivalent of innumerancy.

Hebrews 8:10

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people



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