Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

This is gross technological naivete. If the delivery is not the same, then the message, quite likely, is not the same.

Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.

that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself

What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation.

The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.

Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. “An American,” he wrote, “cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say ‘Gentlemen’ to the person with whom he is conversing.”