(23:15)

     Neil Postman:  “Like many other social artifacts, childhood became obsolete at the same time that it was perceived as a permanent fixture.   I choose 1950 because by that year television had become firmly installed in American homes, and it is in television that we have the coming together of the electric and graphic revolutions.  It is in television, therefore, that we can see most clearly how and why the historic basis for a dividing line between childhood and adulthood is being unmistakably eroded.

     The period in which we live is, of course, the incunabula of television.  After the invention of the printing press it took sixty years for printers to arrive at the idea of numbering pages of books.  Who knows what the future holds for television?  There may be novel and profound uses for it that will be thought by people not yet born.  But if we consider broadcast commercial television as we presently know it, we can see in it, quite clearly, a paradigm of an emerging social structure that must ‘disappear’ childhood.”

           Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood   1982 p.75