Sublime

hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.

Look at the news magazines which have been successful in attracting readers: Time and Newsweek in the United States, L’Express and Le Point in France, Der Spiegel in Germany, L’Espresso in Italy, Cambio 16 in Spain. They all use the same graphics: O Copy has priority over illustration. O The copy is set in serif type. O Three columns of type, 35 to

Before writing his biography of Lasker,1 John Gunther asked some of his people what they thought had been his greatest qualities. The consensus was that he combined a sense of detail with a gift for grasping the big picture, and that he had a genius for predicting the reactions of consumers.

After von Neumann, Shannon was the most important figure in the establishment of the system of the world that Google now embodies. I would like to say that he showed the way out. But Shannon himself ended up enmeshed in the same materialist superstition that afflicts the Google Age. “I think man is a machine of a very complex sort,”

controlling for brand size and category prototypicality and looking for where the brand scores substantively lower than expected (see messaging analysis in Chapter 7) •looking for reasons behind spikes in brand rejection or customer complaints (see Brand Rejection analysis in Chapter 8).

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Academia stifles cinema, encircling it like a liana vine wraps round a tree, smothering and draining away all life. Construct films, don’t deconstruct them. Create poetry, don’t destroy it. Whenever I encounter film theorists, I lower my head and charge.

These two scenes show us the value-shifting magic of language. Language can shape how we frame our experiences. Language can make us pay extra attention to what we consume and direct our attention to specific parts of the experience.