Turn Off The Tube?

My son's school just participated in "turn-off-the-tube-week" and I had the privilege of telling stories for the school's family night program. I shared the following from E.B. White. In his column for Harper's Weekly in 1938, E. B. White made this observation about the coming technology called television:

"Clearly the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between things that are and the things that seem to be, between the chemist of RCA and the angel of God. Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound "effects" are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself. Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images - distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar than their originals."