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

In oral cultures, parables and proverbs were necessary tools for codifying and remembering ancient wisdom and ideas. They were easily transferrable and laid the foundation for thought itself.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.