2021年12月英语六级（第3套 · 含听力）仔细阅读 Passage 1

The trend toward rationality and enlightenment was endangered long before the advent of the World Wide Web. As Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the rise of television introduced not just a new medium but a new discourse: a gradual shift from a typographic culture to a photographic one, which in turn meant a shift from rationality to emotions, exposition to entertainment. In an image-centered and pleasure-driven world, Postman noted, there is no place for rational thinking because you simply cannot think with images. It is text that enables us to "uncover lies, confusions and overgeneralizations, and to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another."
The dominance of television was not confined to our living rooms. It overturned all of those habits of mind, fundamentally changing our experience of the world. Conduct of politics, religion, business, and culture was reduced to entertainment, sensationalism, and commerce. "Americans don't talk to each other; we entertain each other," Postman wrote. "They don't exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials."
At first, the web seemed to push against this trend. When it emerged towards the end of the 1980s as a purely text-based medium, it was seen as a tool to pursue knowledge, not pleasure. Reason and thought were most valued in this garden—all derived from the project of the Enlightenment. Universities around the world were among the first to connect to this new medium, which hosted discussion groups, informative personal or group blogs, electronic magazines, and academic mailing lists and forums. It was an intellectual project, not about commerce or control, created in a scientific research center in Switzerland. For more than a decade, the web created an alternative space that threatened television's grip on society.