One of the notable effects of technical change has been the obsolescence of leather-lunged oratory of the William Jennings Bryan school, in favor of the fireside chat of Franklin Roosevelt; with electrical amplification, a speaker could use conversational style and still be understood in a large auditorium.
A defect running through his otherwise admirable modes of instruction, as it did through all his modes of thought, was that of trusting too much to the intelligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied in the concrete.
I have noted that throughout La vie la mort Derrida calls attention to this programming machine, a machine that operates effectively to auto-reproduce biological, political, and pedagogical sameness and that in so doing, attempts to reify (“cadaverize”) the living body and the living body of language (for this, see especially Derrida's “Nietzsche and the Machine”).
