Abstract
AT the recent annual meeting of the Institut de France, Dr. Georges Duhamel, the well-known writer and editor of the Mercure de France, deplored what he called the constitutional defects of the radio, which he declared has an unfavourable and even demoralizing effect on the intellectual habits of the middle classes. In the first place he asserted that the radio draws many persons away from reading by depriving them of part of their leisure and making them gradually lose the habit of active cerebral work. Some people, he continued, are misled by the radio into imagining that the mind can attend to two objects at the same time, which is a mistake. Far from contributing to true culture, the radio encourages a taste for superficial ideas which are easily acquired and soon lost. In answer to the objection that the radio adds to without supplanting the other modes of information and knowledge, Dr. Duhamel maintained that we cannot safely disregard or decry a system of culture which has been tested for centuries in favour of a new process of which the remote results are necessarily quite unknown. As regards the plea that the radio is a source of pleasure, Dr. Duhamel retorted that no pleasure can last several hours a day, and that for some people the radio ceases almost at once to be a pleasure and becomes a craving.
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The Radio and Culture. Nature 142, 1154 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/1421154a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1421154a0