Solitude

摘要

"The new technology is marvelous," said an awed Frank Stanton, longtime president of the Columbia Broadcasting System. He could look up at the sky above his New York office and envision a time when satellites carried CBS's news programs far and wide. That's certainly the case today, and it's not the only change in communications that Forbes saw coming: everything from smartphones-a.k.a. "miniaturized 'Dick Tracy' phones," as we called them-to information instantly available via computer to a proliferation of television channels that would force any serious presidential candidate to be "a photogenic TV personality." A few predictions went awry, including that the U.S. Postal Service, a "ponderous institution" even in 1967, would go electronic. But it was also clear that these innovations would come with a cost, something felt keenly in socially distant 2020. "If our only main contact with people is electronic, then we can't have real feelings," warned Dr. Harry Levinson, an expert on mental health at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. "We can't know each other.... We may get a vast knowledge of what's going on, but at the price of isolating people."