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.

How often does the information that you get in the morning radio, television, or newspaper, make you alter your plans for the day? Or give you anything useful besides something to talk about? When the telegraph came along and made information transmission fast and cheap, it multiplied the information we had available to us, and created a... See more

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.

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 the 1830s, “pamphlets” were popular and used to spread ideas and news and gossip, since they were more ephemeral than books, but they also became irrelevant much faster.

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.

Literacy was extremely high in the US colonies, some of the highest in the world.

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.

51% of viewers cannot recall a single item of news a few minutes after viewing a news program on television, and we can only retain 20% of the information in a fictional televised news story. 21% can’t remember any items within one hour of broadcast.