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In each successive modern war, the competition in technology becomes more fierce—and more effective. The splitting of the atom and the exploring of space bear witness to the stimulus of competition, the convergence of efforts, the involuntary collaboration of wartime enemies. Technology is the natural foe of nationalism.
With crushing inevitability, the advance of technology brings nations together and narrows the differences between the experiences of their people. The destruction of modern warfare tends to reduce the balance of advantage between victor and vanquished. The spectacular industrial progress of Japan and Germany after World War II was actually facilitated by the wholesale destruction of their industrial plant.
Each forward step in modern technology tends to reduce the difference between the older categories of experience. Take, for example, the once elementary distinction between transportation and communication: between moving the person and moving the message. While communication once was an inferior substitute for transportation (you had to read the account because you couldn't get there), it is now often the preferred alternative.
The television screen (by traditional categories a mode of communication) brings together people who still remain in their separate living rooms. With the increasing congestion of city traffic, with the parking problem and the lengthened holding patterns over airports, our television screen becomes a superior way of getting there. So when it comes to public events, now you are often more there when you are here than when you are there!
Broadcasting is perhaps the most potent everyday witness to the converging powers of technology. The most democratic of all forms of public communication, broadcasting converges people, drawing them into the same experience in ways never before possible. The great levelers, broadcast messages and images, go without discrimination into the homes of rich and poor, white and black, young and old. More than 99% of American households have at least one television set. If you own a set, no admission fee is required to enter TV land and to have a front seat at all its marvels. No questions are asked, no skill is needed.
You need not even sit still or keep quiet. To enjoy what TV brings, the illiterate are just as well qualified as the educated — some would say even better qualified. Our Age of Broadcasting is a fitting climax, then, to the history of a nation whose birth certificate proclaimed that "all men are created equal" and which has aimed to bring everything to everybody