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

They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images.

For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for believing.

In understanding their metaphorical function, we must take into account the symbolic forms of their information, the source of their information, the quantity and speed of their information, the context in which their information is experienced.

Theirs was a duet of image and instancy, and together they played the tune of a new kind of public discourse in America.

a curriculum is a specially constructed information system whose purpose is to influence, teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth.

Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it.

I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set.

Even in the everyday world of commerce, the resonances of rational, typographic discourse were to be found. If we may take advertising to be the voice of commerce, then its history tells very clearly that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries those with products to sell took their customers to be not unlike Daniel Webster: they assumed that po

Ernst Cassirer remarked: Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anythi