You must pardon our audacity in presuming to say anything of substance about the foundations of cultural change in such brief space. Our apology for undertaking such a task lies in part in our spirit of adventure, and in part in our qualified intention to be suggestive rather than comprehensive. We are not aiming at conclusive scientific or scholarly documentation. We are being speculative, as scientists and scholars are sometimes prone to be when they are away from the laboratory or library, or when they are nagged by some of the nettlesome questions they feel compelled to come to terms with as men, but which professional prudence generally forbids them to talk about in formal conference or print. We would also like to make public our belief in the deep friendship between the sciences and humanities by unabashedly talking to each other in public, proclaiming common interests in common problems, and suggesting that in collaboration we will find the best basis to our problems' solution.

We live in a world of constant change. Western society as opposed to Eastern society has always been characterized by change, though perhaps today Eastern societies such as China and Japan are changing faster than we of the West.

Our folklore in America pictures the “new” world that Rip van Winkle found when he awakened. Every day we listen for the news. What's new in the world? We have a newspaper. We have newscasters on the media. We greet each other with, “What's new?” Our scientists set out for New Worlds to conquer. We have New Math and Art Nouveau. We change washing machine models every year. We change dress and hair styles. In most cases anything 100 years old is fit only for discard. We tear down our old buildings and move to the suburbs. Things change so fast we don't have time or the inclination or the ability to evaluate whether it was really necessary to have a new style of car or washing machine or a new design for the detergent box. We are driven by maximizing of profits, by being efficient, and by moving people and things.

Three films circumscribe the counterculture of the last decade. These three films have as their subject the counterculture, and they themselves became cultural events. Woodstock, Easy Rider, and A Clockwork Orange: they define, warn, and predict. Woodstock (the event) and Woodstock (the film, which became the event for millions of the young) defined the counterculture of the 1960's. Of course, that definition did not begin the phenomenon of a youth culture that runs counter. Nor was Woodstock the first description of it. Anthony Burgess wrote his counterculture novel A Clockwork Orange over 10 years ago, and he has told us in a June 8, 1972, Rolling Stone article that he planned the book nearly 30 years ago. The droogs in that novel were some version of Teddy Boys or greasers or hipsters projected into an apocalyptic future: “The work merely describes certain tendencies I observed in Anglo-American society in 1961 (and even earlier).” Some of those tendencies, and several others, were exposed by the counterculture itself in Easy Rider, just before Woodstock. But Woodstock purified and refined the counterculture—and successfully made it self-conscious, mythologized it. And thus defined it.

Stuart hampshire has used the term “irresponsibility” to describe or set apart creative activity of an artistic sort from a code of behavior as it is defined and practiced by society. This code is a product of the society's value system and establishes what is or is not responsible behavior.

Most of the new developments in the mass media during the 1960's turned out to be unfulfilled promises, for good or ill. A partial list is suggestive:

1. The tapering off of the underground press.

2. The inconclusive, still smoldering Agnew controversy.

3. The decline of the mass magazine.

4. The rise of pornography as a mass medium.

5. The gradual eclipse of McLuhan and his theories.

6. The ambiguous influence of TV in politics following the excitement of the Kennedy-Nixon debates.

7. The blunted impact of the big reports: Kerner, Eisenhower, Pornography, and the Surgeon-General's report on violence.

8. The failure of educational TV to get up a full head of steam.

9. The failure of commercial TV to develop new, innovative, and imaginative programs.

10. The technological promises unfulfilled: the electronic newspaper and magazine, TV cassettes, CATV's slow march, home video tapes, 3-D TV, and so on, along with the persistence of raised-type printing, radio, comic strips, newsboys, and much else often proclaimed obsolete.

Despite inevitable overlapping, it is convenient to divide the foregoing into print and broadcasting.