The Null Device

The decline and fall of Western civilisation (an ongoing saga): British costume-drama producer Ismael Merchant complains that English good manners are no more, and that the country has been taken over by a "lower class" obsessed with football and making money. For this sad state of affairs, Merchant puts some of the blame on the Internet and computers:

"What made a person civilised in the past is reading, writing and the art of conversation. Now that has all changed. Human relations now are established with laptops, not with other human beings, which makes for a very boring film - unless you have someone springing up out of the laptop to murder someone else.

Of course, reading only works to impart civilisation if the materials read are printed on paper and bound in a book (a leather-bound volume of imposing antiquity, mind you, not one of those proletarian paperbacks), and preferably if the author is prestigiously long-dead.

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