from Telecom Digest. [I did not distribute Informing Ourselves to Death by Postman due to size . Ha

[David Farber <>]

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