The Screens
February 16, 2022
ALAN writes:
When the central St. Louis Public Library opened in 1912 and for many years afterward, there were thousands of books in the building, but there were no screens in the modern sense of that word. The only “screens” in the building were those that people — staff and patrons alike — carried with them in their head: The “screen” of imagination, a phrase I use with extreme reluctance because it is so unfair to the capacity of imagination, which includes the capacity for conceptual thought, comprehension, reason, and memory.
Today, a century later, there are more than 150 screens in that building, including those for staff, reference and catalog, those with Internet access for patrons, and six oversize screens used for cutesy, colorful, trendy, and always-politically-correct signs and scenes, the purpose of which is to “catch the eye” (or to assault the imagination, depending on one’s perspective).
To glamorize the Here, the Now, the Concrete — represented on screens, is effectively to diminish the abstract, the conceptual, the past — represented in books with words.
That is why Americans are now taught to incorporate screens into every part of their homes and lives. It is all part of the calculated dumbing down that the late American patriot Charlotte Iserbyt chronicled extensively in her excellent work. It is why books and magazines are increasingly designed to resemble comic books, and why libraries and bookstores are overstuffed with picture books for children: To get them accustomed first to looking at pictures in books and then at pictures on screens. It is the Lure of Gadgets against the Capacity for Thought. The unstated mandate is: You must not remember. You must not think. You must gape. You must be receptive to what the screen tells you.
The goal is to prevent or minimize the development of the capacity for independent, conceptual thought. What you must learn is that whether and what you think will be determined not by you but by those who control the screens.
I remember watching early episodes of television’s “The Outer Limits” in 1963. At the outset of each episode, the Control Voice said:
“We are controlling transmission. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear.”
But that was modest. The Control Voices have now increased and expanded their power across the culture. Omnipresent screens are their levers for controlling people who think they are being informed and entertained.
