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

But our reach for solutions ought to exceed our present grasp, or what’s our dreaming for?

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became the c

major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.

For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for believing.

What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation.