A Commonplace Book

The TV children ... have the tribal habit of responding emotionally to the spoken word, they are "hot," they want to participate, to touch, to be involved. On the one hand, they can be more easily swayed by things like demagoguery. The visual or print man is an individualist; he is "cooler," with built-in safeguards. He always has the feeling that no matter what anybody says, he can go check it out. The necessary information is filed away somewhere, categorized. He can look it up. Even if it is something he can't look up and check out -- for example, some rumor like "the Chinese are going to bomb us tomorrow" -- his habit of mind is established. He has the feeling: All this can be investigated -- looked into. The aural man is not so much of an individualist; he is more a part of the collective consciousness; he believes.