Soaring sales of even smarter electronic devices are hailed widely by the computer trade as the beginning of a new age of grander, intellectual horizons for ordinary folks. For many, it may turn out that way. But for many more, the new gadgets will mean a decline in the need to think hard, just as the revolution in mechanical machinery produced a decline in the need to work hard. The removal of mind from living has been immensely accelerated by electronics, but it's also to be found in other manifestations of high-tech society. So-called convenience foods, for example, which are booming despite their higher costs, enable the consumer to buy the manufacturer's skills, rather than go through the mental process of acquiring and employing those skills.
Time is saved, but, again, at the cost of thinking how to get something done.
There's no scientific proof of cause and effect, they report. Some even scoff at the thought it might exist, pointing out that in the pre-TV era, those hours that kids now spend before the TV screen were devoted to radio listening and comic books. They sure were, and I remember it. But to equate those long ago pastimes with today's glazed-eyes TV viewing does violence to comparative studies of American culture. Comic books involved the act of acquisition, through purchase or trading, and their pleasures required reading and turning pages.