Major new mediums change the structure of discourse. Books demand that you sit still and pay attention for long periods. Television’s demands on you are much different.

One problem with writing: once it’s put in words and recorded, you feel bound to it, it becomes harder to adjust your ideas later.

In a pre-television word, the name of a famous person would bring ideas to mind. But in post television world, it brings a face to mind. What do you think of when you hear Clinton, Nixon, Elvis, probably first their face.

Every new medium of communication changes communication, whether that’s painting or hieroglyphs or the alphabet or television. Each medium creates a new orientation for thought, expression, and sensibility.

The danger of education as entertainment is that students will learn that learning should be a form of entertainment, and that anything worth learning can take the form of entertainment, and ought to.

The average length of a news story is only 45 seconds, but it’s not possible to convey the whole depth of an important story in such short a time. It’s meant to entertain, to be trivial.

The idea there is “news of the day” was created by the telegraph, which first made it possible to move decontextualized information over great distances at great speed. But “news of the day” is a figment of our imagination, it exists only because of communication speeds.

“We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.”

Questions about how television shapes our culture have disappeared as television has become our culture. We rarely talk about television, rather what is on television.