Reading and Thought by Dwight MacDonald Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Reading and Thought by Dwight MacDonald - Essay Example He has made a stark contrast between the people in the sixteenth century with the modern day person and highlighted the negative impacts of the habits of a fast paced life. He has used Henry Luce’s journalistic empire as an example to coherently put his point forward to the reader through the examples aforementioned in this paragraph. However, I disagree with Macdonald. Macdonald in his criticism does not look upon the technological advancements and the research and development going on in this world. Modern day technology has made accessibility to information so much easier with the development of tablets, smartphones and laptops. Macdonald considers the internet as a collection of the world untouched literary work. What Macdonald fails to understand is that while the people in the sixteenth century had more time to dwell on the literature they lacked the quantity of literature. There wasn’t information about everything available as in today’s world rather a lot of time was spent on finding relative literature. In comparison, finding topic specific information is extremely efficient and can be accessed immediately. Macdonald starts of his article by underlining how Henry Luce had come to cash on the human natural weakness of being ‘well informed’ and made a journalistic empire for himself. Henry Luce the owner of the ‘Time’magazine coined the term ‘functional curiosity’ and he believes that it is because of this his magazine’s circulation has risen to more than two million people since its inception in 1925. The word ‘functional curiosity can be defined as one of the basic human thirst for obtaining knowledge by searching and looking, it is the kind of hungry and intense thirst for knowledge about what is happening everywhere which is not related for amusement purposes but has a solid belief that everything happening