Sublime

the internet not only had democratized information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,”

The viewers also know that no matter how grave any fragment of news may appear

Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.

the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation.

As John Dewey once observed, communication is not simply the pipe through which water flows. It locates humans squarely in the realm of meanings, and that struggle over meaning is always where democracy can be found.

It is an argument that fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.