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Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)
/^t/There are various other factors that limit the development of our mind. First, the communication development, as it has become so easy, there is less need to concentrate the mind. To receive information, we need only sit in front of the TV set and flick from channel to channel with a remote control. To impart information, we need only pick up a telephone and throw out phrases in random sequence, punctuated with "ums" and "errs". In the 60s the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan predicted the advent of film and TV would have as radical an effect on our culture as the invention of a printing press had on the culture of the Middle Ages. He predicted that books would become obsolete in one generation. He has been proved wrong in that point, however, who knows what would happen in 100 or 200 hundred years, as although more books are now published than ever before, the vast majority of these books demand little literacy, imagination and intelligence. Having been at the centre of our culture for the past 3 or 4 hundred years, they have now been pushed to the margins, either as adjuncts to TV series, or as a form of entertainment for those few moments when we are out of reach of a screen - on the beach, on a plane, or as a help to prepare people for sleep at the end of a busy day.