"Now, I wrote, I'll be really depressing, I'll tell you what I think TV is doing to us. I think it is going to destroy two arts, ruining the audience for painting and for storytlling. Now we are coming to the world with computers that will be programmed one way or another as there are computers in there we are apparently born with but most of us have to be programmed and one thing we hve done for hundreds of years is programmed our children to be imaginative. To build their minds synapse by synapse, a circuit that will allow them to imagine a lot to put on big shows in their head based on very minimal cues.

When you teach a kid to read, you're saying to the kid as he's reading a story, 'isn't it too bad that little girls dog died? Doesn't that make you sad?' Or, 'isn't that funny that that conceited man in the top hat, that rich man slipped on a bannana peel, isn't that funny?' And we are building this network of, these nervous pathes through the kids mind so that on the basis of very minimal cues, he'll be able to put wonderful show on in his head or her head. The same way with paintings, they're rectangles with color dobbed on them, right? They don't move, they don't talk, they don't do anything and they've been there for years doing absolutely nothing. So they take the kids to art galleries and 'why do you think that woman's smiling or is she smiling do you think?' or 'why is that man angry?' or 'doesn't that food look good enough to eat?' All this, and so again, we are teaching the kid how to respond to very minimal cues.

Now about literacy, think of what it is? It's impossible, books, written matter, consists of random arrangements of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers and eight or ten punctuation marks. And we think look at this, those of us who can read, and stage terrific shows in our head just from random arrangements, of that little, those minimal cues. And we train kids to be imaginative so that they can still be entertained and interested and constructive when nothing much was really ging on. I call books an early attempt to invent television. So now, we have television, an amazing artificial network, it's obsolete now, it's not needed. To see wonderful shows, all we have to do is turn on a switch now. You don't have to imagine in your head. And so I think in time, we will have grown ups who have not been trained, have not been programmed to be imaginative because they can turn on switcheds and asee truly marvelos things and so they will look at piantings and they will look at random arrangements of tewnty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers and eight punctuation marks and wonder how anybody could have been excited by artificats that dead, that simple and dead. I think that's what's going to happen. That's too bad.

Again, there's no malice involved here, nobody knew what television could do to us, it simply came into being but it will at minimum do that to us. It's one thing that we may regret is that imagination may be the basis for compassion and compassion is already in short supply on this planet."

© 1994 SpiFFinG/K. Vonnegut