Recently finished reading
September 27, 2024Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, first published in 1985. It’s written specifically about television, but near the end of the book, he speculates (acerbically) about another, then-nascent medium:
“…Americans have afforded [the personal computer] their customary mindless inattention; which means they all use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology–that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data–will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and created at least as many problems for them as the may have solved.”