He has one sibling, a sister, Beth Stephens, who is an international human rights lawyer and law professor at Rutgers in Camden, New Jersey.
Stephens pointed out that the opposite transformation happened over several millennia as our oral culture (based on long tales and poems detailing people's history)was displaced by writing and then the printing press and mass literacy.
[2] He uses statistics to show the plummeting number of Americans who read regularly and while conceding that he himself is a book lover, he thinks it pointless to resist the process.
Mitchell made a startingly accurate prediction in the intro: "Perhaps we will soon locate our video at sites on the World Wide Web".
Stephens has completed a journey around the world (December 2000 to August 2001), working on the theories of cultural homogenization and travel itself.
His work related to his travels through 38 countries by cars, buses, boats, trains, ferries, freighters, and by foot can be seen in FEED magazine, LonelyPlanet.com, ROADthinker.com, ideaVIDEO.com, and in "Marketplace" reports for public radio.