When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master.
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it.
Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation.
Poetry, the drama, the novel, are proofs that the problem of presentation is not insoluble.
Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire and thought.
The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.
Men’s conscious life of opinion and judgment often proceeds on a superficial and trivial plane.
The freeing of the artist in literary presentation, in other words, is as much a precondition of the desirable creation of adequate opinion on public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry.
The material would have such an enormous and widespread human bearing that its bare existence would be an irresistible invitation to a presentation of it which would have a direct popular appeal.
A newspaper which was only a daily edition of a quarterly journal of sociology or political science would undoubtedly possess a limited circulation and a narrow influence.
Presentation is fundamentally important, and presentation is a question of art.
A technical high-brow presentation would appeal only to those technically high-brow; it would not be news to the masses.