Source: Washington Post
by George F Will
“Historian Daniel J. Boorstin glimpsed the future in 1962. Forty-five years before the iPhone arrived, his book ‘The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America’ included a joke: A woman exclaims to a mother pushing a pram, ‘My, that’s a beautiful baby you have there!’ The mother replies, ‘Oh, that’s nothing — you should see his photograph.’ In 1962, television represented the graphic revolution that had begun with photography and continued with movies. The anxiety was that people would prefer the artificial to the real. In 1960, a telegenic president (John F. Kennedy) had been elected, intensifying worries that the graphic revolution would manipulate us. Today, Christine Rosen worries that we are manipulating, and diminishing, ourselves.” (03/07/25)