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TECHNOLOGY INSULATES AND ISOLATES. While technology seems to bring us together, it does so only by making new ways of separating us from one another. The One World of Americans in the future will be a world of 200 million private compartments. The progression from the intimately jostling horse-drawn carriage to the railroad car to the encapsulated lone automobile rider and then to the seat-belted airplane passenger who cannot converse with his seatmate because they are both wearing earphones for the recorded music; the progression from the parent reading aloud to the children, to the living theater with living audiences, to the darkened motion-picture house, to the home of private television sets, each twinkling in a different room for a different member of the family — these are the natural progressions of technology. Each of us will have his personal machine, adjusted, focused and preselected for his private taste. CB radio now has begun to provide every citizen with his own broadcasting and receiving station. Each of us will be in danger of being suffocated by our own tastes. Moreover, these devices that enlarge our sight and vision in space seem somehow to imprison us in the present. The electronic technology that reaches out instantaneously over the continents does very little to help us cross the centuries.
TECHNOLOGY UPROOTS. In this Republic of Technology the experience of the present actually uproots us and separates us from our own special time and place. For technology aims to dilute and immunize us against the peculiar chances, perils and opportunities of our natural climate, our raw landscape. The snowmobile makes a steep mountain slope or the tongue of a glacier just another highway. Our America has been blessed by a myriad variety of landscapes. But whether we are on the mountaintop, in the desert, on shipboard, in our automobile or an airplane, we are protected from the climate, the soil, the sand, the snow, the water. Our roots, such as they are, grow in an antiseptic hydroponic solution. Instead of enjoying the weather given us "by Nature and by Nature's God" (in Jefferson's phrase), we worry about the humidifier and the air conditioner.
Many of these currents of change carry us further along the grand and peculiarly American course of our history. More than any other modern people we have been free of the curse of ideology, free to combine the nations, free to rise above chauvinism, free to take our clues from the delightful, unexplored, uncongested world around us. We have, for the most part, avoided the brutal homogeneities of the concentration camp and the instant orthodoxies that are revisable at the death of a Mao. During our first two centuries, a raw continent made us flexible and responsive. Our New World remains more raw and more unexplored than we will admit.
The Republic of Technology offers us the opportunity to make our nation's third century American in some novel ways. We remain the world's laboratory. We like to try the new as do few other peoples in the world. Our experiment of binding together peoples from everywhere by opportunities rather than by ideologies will continue. The Republic of Technology offers fantastic new opportunities for opportunity.