Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thoughtWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization; Communication and traffic; Social prediction; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
ample amount of ably written controversy upon everything under the sun.
The correspondence columns, instead of being an exercising place for
bores and conspicuous people who are not mercenary, will be the most
ample, the most carefully collected, and the most highly paid of all
departments in this paper. Personal paragraphs will be relegated to some
obscure and costly corner next to the births, deaths, and marriages.
This paper will have, of course, many pages of business advertisements,
and these will usually be well worth looking through, for the more
intelligent editors of the days to come will edit this department just
like any other, and classify their advertisements in a descending scale
of freshness and interest that will also be an ascending scale of price.
The advertiser who wants to be an indecent bore, and vociferate for the
ten millionth time some flatulent falsehood about a pill, for instance,
will pay at nuisance rates. Probably many papers will refuse to print
nasty and distressful advertisements about people's insides at all. The
entire paper will be as free from either greyness or offensive stupidity
in its advertisement columns as the shop windows in Bond Street to-day,
and for much the same reason,--because the people who go that way do not
want that sort of thing.
It has been supposed that, since the real income of the newspaper is
derived from advertisements, large advertisers will combine in the
future to own papers confined to the advertisements of their specific
wares. Some such monopoly is already attempted; several publishing firms
own or partially own a number of provincial papers, which they adorn
with strange "Book Chat" columns conspicuously deficient in their
information; and a well-known cycle tyre firm supplies "Cycling" columns
that are mere pedestals for the Head-of-King-Charles make of tyre. Many
quack firms publish and give away annual almanacks replete with
economical illustrations, offensive details, and bad jokes. But I
venture to think, in spite of such phenomena, that these suggestions and
attempts are made with a certain disregard of the essential conditions
of sound advertisement. Sound advertisement consists in perpetual
alertness and newness, in appearance in new places and in new aspects,
in the constant access to fresh minds. The devotion of a newspaper to
the interest of one particular make of a commodity or group of
commodities will inevitably rob its advertisement department of most of
its interest for the habitual readers of the paper. That is to say, the
newspaper will fail in what is one of the chief attractions of a good
newspaper. Moreover, such a devotion will react upon all the other
matter in the paper, because the editor will need to be constantly alert
to exclude seditious reflections upon the Health-Extract-of-Horse-Flesh
or Saved-by-Boiling-Jam. His sense of this relation will taint his
self-respect and make him a less capable editor than a man whose sole
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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