ABSTRACT
Poverty is safe when it is unaware and alone. The poverty in today's world is increasingly aware. And it no longer needs a still uncommon literacy to inform it. The air is full of pictures and sounds, from advertising posters, television and cinema screens, radio sets. The most ragged of the workless in the cities of Brazil can catch sight of television and the cinema glares in a thousand small Indian towns, within reach of other forsaken villages around. The cheap radio set, pouring unsuspected desires and demands in a cataract of local languages, finds an audience in stretches of Africa or Andean America which have never seen a book. And disaffection is just the other side of discovery.
