Communications that engage our reason have enabled great progress, but are in the process of being eclipsed.

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Active-engagement forms of communication are the more traditional kind that the recipient deliberately pays attention to—requiring his active participation, and permitting extensive exercise of logical evaluative functions.  These forms include conversations and group discussions, letters, and journals and periodicals of various kinds, such as nonfiction magazines, newspapers, and other elements of the more traditional news media.

Also covered are traditional political communications like the Lincoln-Douglas debates or William Jennings Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech.

More recently, this mode has come to include some sources of information and opinion on the Internet.

Certain key forms of active-engagement communications are where new knowledge tends to be shared when we're not entirely sure of it—before it is more formally established in textbooks and the like.   Communications of this type have in the past few centuries been of tremendous social value, by supporting an explosively expanding realm of research, scholarship, and education.

But now, as the sheer bulk of available knowledge and information comes to be popularly perceived as daunting, even oppressive, other forms of communication are gaining an edge.

(c) COPYRIGHT 1998 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED