In response to David Kline's Blog!, pages 237-252:
After reading the following pages I found that there was nothing that I disagreed with. I support the fact that the relationship between America and the media is now strained. Over the past decades we have put so much faith into delivering the truth to us. Now that we know we cant always trust them to deliver us the information that we need, we begin to lose faith. I did find a statement that I thought was just weird, there is no better word to describe it. George Gilder claims that "Over the next decade (claims this in 1994) TV will expire and transpire into a new cornucopia of choice and empowerment...Hollywood and Wall St. will totter and diffuse to all points of the nation and the globe..[and] the most deprived ghetto child in the most blighted project will gain educational opportunities exceeding those of today's suburban preppy." (p.238)
What does his argument even mean? Not only am I confused by this staement, the authors of this book also reject Gilder's comment. His statment can be viewed as "too good to be true". The points he emphasizes are so far down the road, that is if they ever happen. Hollywood and Wall St. are still thriving and from the looks of it are going to be for a while. We still have so many issues with education and poverty in this country. It would take years and years to rebuild those areas. His statment was so confusing to me, to this point I'm not fully comprhending the point he was trying to make.
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2 comments:
Kate,
That quote was from a book I wrote in 1990 (current edition is Norton, 1994) called Life After Television. It argued that "worldwide webs of glass and light" coupled with ever more powerful personal computers would allow the emergence of personal video, finance, and education controlled by the users rather than by the incumbent industries (Wall Street, Universities, & Hollywood) and that the improvement in displays would usher in a "golden age of text", which I believe we see on the Internet today, despite the protests of established media. I summed up the change by the replacement of top down media ("TV is a tool for tyrants") with bottom up media (blogs and emails), hierarchies with heterarchies. I think this is happening today.
Be delighted to discuss further if you are interested.
Best,
George Gilder
Wow, Kate! George Gilder himself responded to your post. I won't try to add any teacherly comments to his response, except to note that while it's a little intimidating knowing that one's responses are there for even the author to see, but isn't it also kind of wonderful to have that kind of living contact with the people in our texts?
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