![]() Also keep in mind: there were no photographs. Sure, politicians also gave hour-long speeches, but those were mostly supplemented with text and similar in structure and language. That’s because at the time, reading was both a way of entertainment and the arena of choice for public discourse. That means one in five Americans read it. Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s 49-page pamphlet that advocated for the US to seek independence from Great Britain, was printed 500,000 times – in 1776. ![]() However, even if your book sells ‘just’ one million copies, it’s already part of the top 0.001%.īut not too long ago, things were different. Can you imagine a book being that popular? In recent history, only Hunger Games comes close, with about 65 million copies sold. That’s about a third of the entire population. If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.ĭownload PDF Lesson 1: Less than 200 years ago, everyone was well-read.Ī few days ago, the 52nd Super Bowl glued over 100 million Americans to their TVs. If you’re wondering why we’ve become such bad readers, this is the right place to learn. Everything you see on TV was twisted to entertain, so it’s hard to learn anything.Telegraphy and photography stripped information from its context.The 19th century was the age of reading.Here’s his line of argument in 3 lessons: As early as 1985, it claimed that the rise of TV would be our fall. So when, in the very year it “came true,” Neil Postman showed up to the world’s largest book fair and claimed Huxley was much closer to reality, he caused quite a stir.Īmusing Ourselves To Deathwas the result of his appearance. Especially after World War II, Orwell’s prediction felt much more likely. One claims a totalitarian regime will watch our every move, the other assumes we’ll be numbed to oblivion with consumerism and drugs. Two you might be familiar with from high school days are George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Video games like Bioshock, movies like The Matrix, and lots of classic books fall into the dystopian genre. This is called dystopia – a miserable society. ![]() Some of the world’s most popular science-fiction explores what would happen if not only we tried to build such a place, but also if it went wrong. For example, if you want to help someone deal with rejection you might say: “Life’s not always a bowl of cherries.” A popular German equivalent we have is: “Life’s not a pony farm.” The idea is that on a pony farm, everything is dandy all the time.Ī perfect world, in which everyone is always happy, is called utopia. One thing that’s always fascinated me in English class is how our idioms translate and vice versa. Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account:
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