The technology and the society

Abstract

It is often said that television has altered our world. In the same way, people often speak of a new world, a new society, a new phase of history, being created - ‘brought about’ - by this or that new technology: the steam-engine, the automobile, the atomic bomb. Most of us know what is generally implied when such things are said. But this may be the central difficulty: that the authors have got so used to statements of this general kind, in our most ordinary discussions, that the authors can fail to realize their specific meanings. It can of course be said that these fundamental questions are very much too difficult; and that they are indeed difficult is very soon obvious to anyone who tries to follow them through. The invention of television was no single event or series of events. It depended on a complex of inventions and developments in electricity, telegraphy, photography and motion pictures, and radio.

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