Cloning of the Already Born

To try and make this difficult point, I originally titled the book Suburbanization of the Mind, changing it later to Freewayization of the Mind. Both titles were attempts to suggest what was happening to the way that we think and understand information in the television age; our minds were being channeled and simplified to match the channeled and simplified physical environment- suburbs, malls, freeways, high-rise buildings- that also characterized that period(and continues to do so today). This effect would take place, I argued, even if the violence and sex shows and the superficial comedies and the game shows were all removed from the medium, because the process of moving edited images rapidly through the passive human brain was so different from active information gathering, whether from books or newspapers or walks in nature. As a result people would become more passive, less able to deal with nuance and complexity, less able to read or create. People would get "dumber", and have less understanding of world events even within an exploding information environment.

Jerry Mander
In The Absence Of The Sacred (1991)