After a few days, I noticed that we we turning it off and walking away once the show we were watching was over, rather than sitting passively, waiting for the “next show”. It just wasn’t that interesting.

When we replaced the TV with a color model, we were back in the habit of passive, mindless viewing of whatever was on. It appears that the more “lifelike” the picture, the more we watched TV.

I hate to think of the lure of HDTV – our society may begin to resemble the people in Wall-E.

I’m 66 years old and I’m out,more or less, from 7 am until 9 pm or later every single day. I’m not afraid. I don’t need tv or a movie to tell me what to think,or what is frightening.

The world of print encouraged reflective, analytical, independent minds, producing the culture that westerners think of as normal: rapid technological progress, separation of church and state, so-called democracy, and capitalism.

The world of screen, particularly television, massively limited the reach of print into the full population, while producing effects of its own that seem nearly opposite: in particular, shortened attention spans and valuation of entertainment and emotion over ideas.

Neil Postman’s books (Especially Entertaining Ourselves to Death) did a wonderful job of contrasting the heyday of print with the television era.

It is beyon mere mortals to figure out, however, where the Internet and its allies will take us. An early guess is a valuation of options over all else. Where print produced a cultural norm of investigation and television produced a cultural norm of recreation, I suspect we will now see a cultural norm of choices take hold.

But what will happen to community? Family? The balance between large and small business? Between general citizenry and the elites? And how about intellectual ownership?

However, my read on history is that the critics will prove to be irrelevant. Technology’s impact has little to do with an informed citizenry deciding upon the rules (except perhaps in Amish communities). The new technology will take us where its structure takes us, and we will be alarmed as we go along and surprised when we get there — although, when our grandchildren go back and read through all the predictions from the early 2000s, some will have some truth, if only due to the law of averages.