Great moments in predicting the future, television edition
- 12/27/2007
From the New Yorker, July 14, 1951:
The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon.
"They say it's going to bring back vaudeville," he said, "but I think it's going to bring back the book."
Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory -- movies, comic books, radio.
Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the television screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods and the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages.
It's only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches the point where whole books can be held up to the screen and all their pages slowly turned.
Hey, it could happen!
