Sublime

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

On the simplest level, television prioritizes visual images and the spoken word over written text, as Neil Postman argued in the influential book Amusing Ourselves to Death, written during the heyday of the TV era.

This concept of the arts as prophetic, contrasts with the popular idea of them as mere self-expression.

the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third dimension and the “private point of view” as part of his Narcissus fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake’s awareness or that of the Psalmist, that we become what we behold.

Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century.