/
15.06.2022 at 01:04 am
Cuttings

Prepackaged Thought Cassettes

Think. If you don't, someone will, for you.

... The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements - all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics - to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind" with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all.

Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.

- Mortimer J. Adler
How To Read A Book

We're long past the days of floppy disks and cassettes. But I still remember how I used to slot them into (now-ancient) hardware with ease.

Filed under:
#
#
#
Words: 36 words approx.
Time to read: 0.14 mins (at 250 wpm)
Keywords:
, , , , , , , , ,

Other suggested posts

  1. 25.08.2020 at 09:03 pm / Hamstrung Limitations
  2. 27.04.2020 at 07:11 pm / How Science Should Be
  3. 23.08.2018 at 01:33 am / Darwin's Details
  4. 07.07.2014 at 12:00 am / If I Cannot Strengthen Our Bench
  5. 05.07.2014 at 12:00 am / Jack Hamm on (Artistic) Practice
  6. 02.12.2013 at 12:00 am / Coloured Plasmids
  7. 21.07.2012 at 12:00 am / Hunted By GLaDoS
  8. 19.03.2012 at 12:00 am / Lush Exoplanets
  9. 16.03.2012 at 12:00 am / Sentient Vocal Directives
  10. 14.08.2010 at 12:00 am / 百花繚乱
© Wan Zafran. See disclaimer.