Bücher

Kritiker

Platons Medienkritik

“Kein ernster Mensch wird sich je entschließen, über ernste Dinge zu schreiben und so seine Gedanken der Mißgunst und der Verständnislosigkeit preiszugeben.” (Platon, Briefe VII, 344C )

Der nachfolgende Textausschnitt ist dem Dialog “Phaidros” (übersetzt von O. Apelt) entnommen. Sokrates erzählt die Geschichte von der Erfindung der Schrift durch den ägyptischen Gott Theut. Sokrates erläutert seinem Gesprächspartner Phaidros die Problematik dieser Erfindung:

“…diese Erfindung wird die Lernenden in ihrer Seele vergeßlich machen, weil sie dann das Gedächtnis nicht mehr üben; denn im Vertrauen auf die Schrift suchen sie sich durch fremde Zeichen außerhalb und nicht durch eigene Kraft im Innern zu erinnern. Also nicht ein Heilmittel fur das Gedachtnis, sondern eines für das Wiedererinnern hast du erfunden. Deinen Schülern verleihst du aber nur den Schein der Weisheit, nicht die Wahrheit selbst. Sie bekommen nun vieles zu hören ohne eigentliche Belehrung und meinen nun, vielwissend geworden zu sein, während sie doch meistens unwissend sind und zudem schwierig zu behandeln, weil sie sich für weise halten, statt weise zu sein.” (Platon: Phaidros 274-76)

Genaueres siehe INFORMATIONSETHIK EINE EINFÜHRUNG Online-Version des Buches von Rafael Capurro

Ebenso: Medienkritik bei Platon und Medienkritik heute von Janßen, Barbara (1995), Essener Studienenzyklopädie Linguistik

Zum Lesen: Goody u.a., Entstehung und Folgen der Schriftkultur, Suhrkamp Frankfurt 1986 S.10ff)

Ray Bradbury

In Ray Bradburys Zukunfts-Roman Fahrenheit 451 (1953) erklärt Beatty, der Chef der Feuer-Brigade, seinem zweifelnden Mitarbeiter Montag, warum die Feuerwehr Bücher verbrennen muss (Text gekürzt):

"When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where, when? Well, I`d say it really got started around a thing called the Civil War. Then - motion pictures in the early Twentieth Century, Radio, Television. Things began to have mass. And because they had mass, they became simpler. Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?

Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow-motion. Then, in the Twentieth Century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to a gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. But many where those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there`s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more. Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought.

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped. English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don`t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super-organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before. Now lets take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don`t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their ears to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn`t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass-exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time."

"Yes, but what about the firemen, then?" asked Montag.

"What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers and imaginative creators, the word >intellectual<, of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally >bright<, did most of the reciting and answering. And wasn`t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it."

Befürworter

BOOK

Announcing the new device: Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge (BOOK)

The BOOK is a revolutionary breakthrough in technology: No wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It's so easy to use even a child can operate it. Just lift its cover!

Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere-even sitting in an armchair by the fire-yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM disc. Here's how it works:

Each BOOK is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. These pages are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence. Opaque Paper Technology (OPT) allows manufacturers to use both sides of the sheet, doubling the information density and cutting costs in half.

Experts are divided on the prospects for further increases in information density; for now BOOKs with more information simply use more pages. This makes them thicker and harder to carry, and has drawn some criticism from the mobile computing crowd.

Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into your brain. A flick of the finger takes you to the next sheet. The BOOK may be taken up at any time and used by merely opening it. The BOOK never crashes and never needs rebooting, though like other display devices it can become unusable if dropped overboard. The "browse" feature allows you to move instantly to any sheet, and move forward or backward as you wish.

Many come with an "index" feature, which pinpoints the exact location of any selected information for instant retrieval. An optional "BOOKmark" accessory allows you to open the BOOK to the exact place you left it in a previous session -even if the BOOK has been closed. BOOKmarks fit universal design standards; thus, a single BOOKmark can be used in BOOKs by various manufacturers. Conversely, numerous bookmarkers can be used in a single BOOK if the user wants to store numerous views at once. The number is limited only by the number of pages in the BOOK.

You can also make personal notes next to BOOK text entries with an optional programming tool, the Portable Erasable Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language Stylus (PENCILS).

Portable, durable, and affordable, the BOOK is being hailed as the entertainment wave of the future. The BOOK's appeal seems so certain that thousands of content creators have committed to the platform. Look for a flood of new titles soon.

(Anm.: Dieser Text kursierte im vergangenen Jahrhundert als 'forwarded message' im Internet.)

Siehe auch

• Bibliothek / Mediothek
• Digitale Medien
• Film und Fernsehen
• Zeitungen im Deutschunterricht