With
special reference to:
The
Iliad,
Homer
The Adventures of Don Quixote,
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Elements of a Post-Liberal Theory
of Education, C. A. Bowers
Amusing Ourselves to Death,
Neil Postman
Strong Man,
Frank Johnson
A
Short History of the Title
First
the title was to be: The Image of the Hero from Achilles to Max
Headroom. But there were too many anachronisms. The idea of the
hero may be as old as Ancient Greece but to speak of images is modern
talk. So then it seemed that maybe the idea of the essay could be
better expressed by a title like:
From
the Idea of the Hero to the Image of the Hero: Achilles to Max
Headroom
That
title would have been more accurate but still not a title that would
bring a lot of people into the discussion. For that a title like this
seemed to work better:
Where
did you get THAT idea? Talk, type, or tube in public discourse
That
came closer to the main problem which is to try to understand how
people form their ideas in a world that is being rapidly changed by
the electronic media. The idea of time got into the title just because
there is no way of keeping it out when you are writing about
differences among speaking, writing, and television.
Finally,
the whole essay raises the question: Is public discourse really public
at all? It all depends on definitions, of course, but there is good
reason that much of the worry about the degradation of public
discourse comes from a vague feeling that there really isn't much that
is 'public' about what is coming into our homes from the electronic
media. It may be the difference between the culture that comes from
the people and the culture that is mass produced for the people.
