✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Informing Ourselves To Death

web.archive.org · 4,628 words · saved by 1 readers

The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades -- physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists -- protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the profession is doing and why -- and protects the insiders from close examination and criticism. Professions, in other words, build forbidding walls of technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye cannot see. Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, for I consider myself a professional teacher and appreciate technical gobbledegook as much as anyone. But I do not object if occasionally someone who does not know the secrets of my trade is allowed entry to the inner halls to express an untutored point of view. Such a person may sometimes give a refresh

Informing Ourselves To Death 135 captures 15 Dec 2002 - 14 Jul 2026 Sep OCT Nov 29 2002 2003 2004 success fail About this capture COLLECTED BY Organization: Alexa Crawls Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. Collection: alexa_dt this data is currently not publicly accessible. TIMESTAMPS The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20031029211844/http://www.frostbytes.com:80/~jimf/informing.html Informing Ourselves To Death By Neil Postman The fo

Explore this link on the map →

related reading