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15.06.2022 at 01:04 am
Cuttings

Prepackaged Thought Cassettes

Think. If you don't, someone will, for you.

... The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements - all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics - to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind" with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all.

Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.

- Mortimer J. Adler
How To Read A Book

We're long past the days of floppy disks and cassettes. But I still remember how I used to slot them into (now-ancient) hardware with ease.


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