Downhill All the Way

In 1972 I gave a paper at Writers’ Week in Adelaide on the future of publishing in which I pointed out that there had occurred in the 20th Century an explosion of knowledge which had accelerated after World War II, and that, collectively, we really know more than any one person can absorb in a lifetime – we have seen the last Renaissance Man. I went on to say that it is not surprising that as technology learned how to entertain us we turned from books as a primary source of entertainment to books as instruments of specialized learning whichour formal education had not been capable of supplying. The second half of my 1972 talk was devoted to pointing out that technology, having moved into the entertainment area, was now poised to move on to the education and information arena with far-reaching ramifications for both authors and publishers.