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

Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world—a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again.

And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

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.

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

We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.

Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.

The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.

A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible.

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

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.