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from Telecom Digest. [I did not distribute Informing Ourselves to Death by Postman due to size . Ha
From: David Farber <>
Date: Sun, 30 Jan 1994 13:28:35 -0500
To close this issue of the Digest, George Gilder has written us with a response to Neil Postman's remarks which were printed in these columns a few days ago. I'm always glad when Gilder takes a few minutes out of his schedule to write us; he's one of the best. See the next message ... PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 29 Jan 94 17:14 EST From: George Gilder <0004091174 () mcimail com> Subject: Re: Informing Ourselves to Death Postman may well give us something to meditate upon as we travel down the information superhighway, but nearly everything he says in his speech is nonsense. Computers do not support centralization; they destroy all top down, centralized and master-slave structures. They disestablish all the hierarchies, monopolies, pyramids and power grids of established industrial society. They give every hacker at his workstation the creative power previously commanded by factory tycoons and the communications power once monopolized by broadcasters. IBM, USSR, EEC, NTT, all these colossal acronyms are collapsing into an alphabet soup because of the power of distributed computing governed by the law of the microcosm, the inexorable tendency of the chip to distribute power and intelligence as the density of electronic components rises by an order of magnitude every five years on a single sliver of sand manufacturable for a couple dollars. It is the masses who are always favored by technology; the medieval era Postman acclaims offered a life expectancy of around 35 years to all but the luckier kings and lords. Postman's notion that the distribution of information somehow eclipses knowledge is nonsense; knowledge and wisdom are always rare, but new technologies make it far easier to distribute it. The meaning of life is always elusive, but computers do nothing to inhibit religion or faith. They do everything to impel economic expansion and opportunity, which is a good even in an era when the culture is largely corrupt, and nowhere so corrupt as in the universities upholding an umphalosceptic intellectualism, combined with a luddite resentment of the real accomp- lishments of our age, which are not alas cultural but scientific and technological. To see worlds in a grain of sand, the dream of Blake, is the achievement of the modern cathedral -- the silicon chip. George Gilder
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- from Telecom Digest. [I did not distribute Informing Ourselves to Death by Postman due to size . Ha David Farber (Jan 30)