What do you think are the personal and cultural effects of acquiring new literacies (such as learning another language, using social media, playing sports or video games)?
I can remember my father bringing home our first [television] set — this ornate wooden cabinet that was the size of a small refrigerator, with a round cathode-ray picture tube and wooden speaker grilles over elaborate fabric. Like a piece of archaic furniture, even then. Everybody would gather around at a particular time for a broadcast — a baseball game or a variety show or something. . . . We know that something happened then. We know that broadcast television did something — did everything — to us, and that now we aren’t the same, though broadcast television, in that sense, is already almost over. I can remember seeing the emergence of broadcast television, but I can’t tell what it did to us because I became that which watched broadcast television.
— Science fiction author William Gibson, from “The Art of Fiction, No. 211” The Paris Reviews Interviews