1/27/2005
   slide 13
More Suspicion of Technology
•Archdeacon Frollo in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831): “This will destroy That. The Book will destroy the Edifice.”
•Alexander Pope: printing press unleashed a “deluge of authors” most of which were not fit to read. Also expressed fear of people with false experience gained through reading rather than real life…
•Henry David Thoreau on telegraph lines: “ Maine an d Texas… have nothing important to communicate.”
•In 1877 NYT on Bell’s telephone: “horrible invasion of privacy.”
•Photographs in newspapers called “infantile”
•Early 20th century: pencils with erasers banned in some schools. “The easier errors maybe corrected, the more errors will be made.” (An argument also used against students’ use of word processing in the 1980s.)
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Greeks believed in oral transmission, memorization, mnemonics ( palace metaphor), believed writing would dumb down the mind and education

Answering machines

Call waiting
These arguments similar to use of TV and also of computer, particularly in its visual aspects (gaming, etc.)

Similarly, we hear that images deceive, are for the illiterate, are not an important part of academic discourse. Studying of ancient art OK, but of modern, non-art images often ridiculed as subject matter in universities. “DJ/VJ course”

MCM became department here only recently…  previously semiotics part of English departments…

SOURCES_______________________

Factoids from Rise of the Image, Fall of the Word