Gregg:

Three cheers for good old "billions-and-billions" Carl!  Jodie Foster  
was pretty good in his 1997 novel-adapted movie "Contact," as I recall  
. . . <g>

Excellent description of the now-obsolete TELEVISION *paradigm* --  
which is not the world in which we live today but rather what Marshall  
McLuhan described as "We see the world through the rear-view mirror.   
We march backwards into the future."

For people like Sagan (i.e. academics of the old-school before  
"post-modernism" took over, including most involved in the  
"humanities"), there was a sentimentality for the PRINT paradigm that  
was pushed aside in the 19th-century (but persisted until the  
1950s/60s) -- remembered nostalgically (but not accurately) as period  
of "rationality," which had banished "superstition" (as he calls it  
out, giving away his sympathies.)

This was what McLuhan called the "Gutenberg Galaxy" (the name of his  
1961 work on the topic, which Sagan likely read.) That paradigm  
disappeared with the telegraph and Samuel Morse's 1844 "What Hath God  
Wrought . . . " (taken from Numbers 23:23) . . . !!

Another who took this approach was Neil Postman -- who took the phrase  
"media ecology" from McLuhan and built a career on it.  His version of  
Sagan's complaint was "Amusing Ourselves to Death" but the point was  
the same.

Another nostalgic view is the recent Steven Pinker "Enlightenment  
Now!" book, which tries to recount all the advances we made since the  
17th-century and then makes the obvious mistake of "projecting" even  
more to come.  No, that's not how it works.

As best I can tell, Sagan, Postman, Pinker (and thousands of others)  
haven't figured out why *any* of this happened (which requires  
Aristotle's "formal cause," as interpreted by McLuhan) -- so they have  
no capability to "anticipate" what will come next or, more to the  
point, even understand where we are today . . . <g>

Mark

Quoting "Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx" <[log in to unmask]>:

> Saw this clipped out and posted from Carl Sagan...seems apropos to  
> today's world even more!
>
> [cid:image001.jpg@01D44C12.99400920]
>
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