Narrated by James Burke.

Prolific psychologist Ornstein and historian Burke, best known for his PBS-TV
series Connections, have written an ambitious, entertaining, not always convincing
survey of the interaction of technology, culture, history and the human mind.

Early hominids' use of tools, they maintain, altered the brain's structure over
millennia, favoring reason over emotion and fostering sequential thinking, which
generated language, logic and rules. With the advent of agriculture and writing
in Mesopotamia came social hierarchy. The authors strain mightily to prove that
successive advances in technology -- the Greek alphabet, the weight-driven clock,
Gutenberg's printing press, scientific method, London's stock exchange, modern
clinical medicine, computers, etc. -- radically altered the structure of society,
increasingly concentrating power and knowledge in the hands of a specialized
ruling elite that imposed ever greater degrees of conformity on the masses.

A "cut-and-control" outlook that divides the world into manipulable units is held
responsible for our present ecological crisis. The authors' proposed solution is
a world of small communities with participatory democracy and "webbed education"
whereby information-technology users can access all knowledge as a dynamic whole.

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