Is it natural that one medium should appropriate 183 3. What, for example, is the effect of the telephone in medical practice? In political life? 4. What has been the role of the telephone in the newspaper world? 5. Consider the way in which the telephone is used in Broadway plays, or in Hollywood movies, as indication of its real force and character. 6. What qualities of drama and action come to mind in relating the telephone to stage and movie and novel? 7. Is it natural that one medium should appropriate and exploit another? 8. Is the use one medium makes of another the clearest testimony to its nature? 9. Why is the telephone so irresistibly intrusive? 10. Why do Europeans and especially English people particularly resent the telephone? 11. Why does an Englishman prefer to manage his appointments by telegraph and postcard rather than person-to-person telephone calls? 12. Why is it difficult to exercise delegated authority in a world supplied with telephones? 13. Is the telephone extremely demanding of individual attention? 14. Is it abrupt, intrusive, and indifferent to human concerns? 15. How does the telephone affect the typewriter? Does it enormously speed up and increase the role of the typewriter? Check this question with the book Parkinson’s Law by C.Northcote Parkinson. MOVIES 1. In view of the various cultural backgrounds of England, France, America, Russia, India, and Japan, what qualities would you expect to appear most in the movies made in these countries? 2. In his Film As Art, Rudolph Arnheim for example says that the American film-maker excels in the single shot; the Russian in montage. Why should this be? 3. Why should the European and the Russian and the Japanese have regarded the film as an art form from the first? Why should the English-speaking world have such difficulty in seeing popular forms of entertainment as art forms whether the movie, the comic strip, or the common advertisement? 4. How did movies sell the American way of life to the backward countries of the globe? Consider the role of uniformity and repeatability as indispensable to competition and rivalry. How could competition thrive where unique expression and achievement are stressed? 5. Was the picture story borrowed from the cartoon world? 6. Is there any hook-up between magazine picture stories and silent movies? If so, is it in the isolation of one emotion at a time?