Jesus fucking christ flag if "everyone should familiarize themselves with this discussion" why don't you get started by summarizing what you think is important since it mostly seems like a bunch of philosophers made to fight with each other by proxy via cherry-picking their statements and extrapolating fifty years into the future. If "it applies to everyone for good or ill, how come Is so completely removed from my experience or understanding that it might as well be written in Venusian? Wait wait wait I think I found it towards the end: The accounts and the interviews collected by Martel, along with his own analysis, are instructive and quite representative of a reality that, until now, sociological and philosophical studies have not dared to address. The great majority of humanity does not engage with, produce or appreciate any form of culture other than what used to be considered by cultured people, disparagingly, as mere popular pastimes, with no links to the intellectual, artistic, and literary activities that were once at the heart of culture. This former culture is now dead, although it still survives in small social enclaves, without any influence on the mainstream. Is this it? Is this the piece? Is this the "kids these days" gripe of the essay? 'cuz if so, this is the argument used against the Gutenberg Press. It takes "culture" from the elite and, in giving it to the masses, kills it.A few years before Steiner’s essay, in November 1967, Guy Debord published in Paris La Société du spectacle, whose title is similar to the subtitle of my own collection of essays, although it approaches the theme of culture in different ways.
The author approves of this change, because, as a result, mainstream culture has swept away the cultural life of a small minority that had previously held a monopoly over culture; it has democratized it, putting it within everyone’s reach, and because the contents of this new culture seem to him to be perfectly attuned to modernity, to the great scientific and technological inventions of our era.