How to sound like an Internet pundit: 1978 edition
The quote below is from Daniel Boorstin’s The Republic of Technology (originally published in 1978; part of this quote appears in my book, The Net Delusion).
It’s hard not to notice just how little the populist techno-babble changes, even as the underlying technologies change. Just try replacing “television” with “the Internet” and “Vietnam War” with “Arab Spring” and “civil rights” with “Occupy”…
The democratizing impact of television has been strikingly similar to the historic impact of printing. Even in this, television’s first half-century, we have seen its power to disband armies, to cashier presidents, to create a whole new democratic world - democratic in ways never before imagined, even in America. We cannot ignore the fact that the era when television became a universal engrossing American experience, the first era when Americans everywhere could witness in living colors the sit-ins, the civil rights marches, was also the era of a civil rights revolution, of the popularization of protests on an unprecedented scale, of a new era for minority power, of a newly potent public intervention in foreign policy, of a new, more publicized meaning to the constitutional rights of petition, of the removal of an American President. The Vietnam War was the first American war which was a television experience. Watergate was the first national political scandal which was a television experience. The college-student protests of the sixties were the first nonsporting events to become television experiences.
