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

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.

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

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.

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 significan... 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.

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.

According to Cicero the goal of education was to free the student from the “tyranny of the present,” give them a greater historical context. But television aims to accomodate us to the present.

“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.”

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.