Word: everly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Talk about your sensitive poets. If Emerson found such modest machinery as corn grinders dehumanizing, how would he handle the end of this century? Today we are more than ever slaves of technology, tethered to computers and cell phones and beepers. Meanwhile, we have to cope with unprecedented change. Things are riding us faster and faster...
...each such advance--by easing the transmission of data, whether by sound, print or image--only raised the chances of further advances. Via endless positive feedback, the technological infrastructure for a mature global brain was, in a sense, building itself. And so it had been, ever since the Middle Paleolithic: the story of humankind is faster and vaster data processing...
...where does this cosmic perspective leave us? Inspired? Depressed? As helpless in the face of technology's onslaught as ever...
...Middle Ages that not only was Saladin the sole "modern" mentioned--he had been dead barely 100 years when Dante wrote--but also that a man who had made his name successfully battling Christianity would be lionized by the author of perhaps the most Christ-centered verse ever penned...
...that was only the beginning of a tide of print that has been rising ever since. We can hardly imagine a world without an abundance of printed matter, and thus we take for granted an invention that produced astonishing consequences. Early printed books tended to resemble, in appearance as well as content, the hand-copied manuscripts they were replacing. The dissemination of the writings of Greek and Roman authors led to a revival of the classical learning that spurred the Renaissance. Printed religious texts put the word of God directly into the hands of lay readers. Such personal contacts helped...