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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.