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.

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

all culture is a conversation or, more precisely, a corporation of conversations, conducted in a variety of symbolic modes. Our attention here is on how forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can issue from such forms.

the average television viewer could retain only 20 percent of the information contained in a fictional televised news story.

The single most important fact about television is that people watch it, which is why it is called “television.”

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

Show business is not entirely without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.

You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.