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rosepetal476@squatterz.com

On Books

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excerpts

Excerpts from "The Future of Capitalism" by Lester C. Thurow

pg 83
"The world of written communications, the world that has existed since the onset of widespread literacy, stresses linear logical arguments that move from one point to the next with each point logically building on the last point. Emotional appeals are certainly possible, but they are harder to make on a piece of white paper than face-to-face. A visual-verbal media in many ways moves us back to a world of illiteracy. What counts is the emotive visual appeal to feelings or fears and not the logical appeal to abstract rigorous thought.
Logical appeals can be made on the electronic media, but it is a far better medium for stirring emotions than for transmitting logical information. One has to learn to read. It requires work, time, and investment. One does not have to learn to watch the TV set. It requires no effort. That difference is a big difference. As the vocabularies of those on TV shrink, as they are, the vocabularies of those who watch TV shrink along with them. Moving from the written word to a visual-verbal media is going to change the very ways we think and make decisions. The famous speakers and speeches of ancient Greece and Rome are no more. Neither are those famous American speakers and speeches... The great debates between Webster and Calhoun over slavery or the Gettysburg Address are simply impossible today.
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pg 84
"In a TV culture what one believes to be true is often more important than what is actually true when it comes to understanding and predicting human actions."
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pg 85-87
"The media becomes a secular religion essentially replacing shared history, national cultures, real religions, families, and friends as the dominant force creating our mental pictures of reality. But the media are not Rasputin with covert or overt political agenda. It is not left or right. It has no overarching ideology or agenda... we can denounce it... but the denunciations are irrelevant because the media are not controlled by any one individual or group of individuals. The media simply provide whatever sells--whatever maximizes profits... What sells is excitement...What sells is speed and instant gratification... The electronic media is changing values and those values will in turn change the nature of our society."