The Best of Creative Computing Volume 1 (published 1976)
Fairy Tales Can Come True...It Depends on You (reprinted from Technology and Social Change, 1973)
...IT DEPENDS ON YOU
SAVE THE NEWSPAPERS FOR A WEEK. THEN CUT OUT ARTICLES THAT YOU BELIEVE GIVE
EXAMPLES OF EITHER SIDE OF THE FOLLOWING ISSUES.
Causes and effects in an advanced technological society are so widespread and so
hard to match together, that experts and techniques ordinary people can't
understand ARE/ ARE NOT needed to separate the important from the unimportant in
order to make intelligent decisions.
The real danger IS/IS NOT an increasing tendency to leave decisions that the
people and their representatives used to debate and decide to groups of
independent experts and technicians, elected by nobody and responsible to
nobody.
If our society is becoming more indirect -- we're having more trouble trying to
see the connections between what happened and what caused it -- then direct
participation in government IS/IS NOT becoming less relevant.
The idea that an election for president every four years represents a chance to
speak out on all the decisions society faces for the next four years IS/IS NOT
adequate to contemporary needs.
There IS/IS NOT a way that participation in the old-fashioned use of the word
can substitute for the experts and modern decision-making techniques government
must use today.
ORGANIZE A DEBATE ON THE FOLLOWING:
RESOLVED: The nation needs a new version of democracy and new political
institutions more adequate to the realities of a modern technological society
than what exists at present.
CHOOSE TWO SPEAKERS FOR EACH SIDE, ONE TO PRESENT THE ARGUMENTS, AND ONE T0
REBATE THE OTHER SIDE'S ARGUMENT.
THE SPEAKER FOR THE AFFIRMATIVE SPEAKS FIRST.
THE SPEAKER FOR THE NEGATIVE SPEAKS NEXT.
THE SPEAKER REBUTTING THE AFFIRMATIVE SPEAKS NEXT.
THE SPEAKER REBUTTING THE NEGATIVE SPEAKS LAST.
USE ANYTHING IN THIS PAMPHLET FOR EVIDENCE, AS wELL AS ANYTHING ELSE You CAN
FIND THAT IS RELEVANT.
THE REST or THE CLASS WILL ACT AS A JURY.
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