The 1980 George W. S. Trow essay “Within the Context of No Context” argued that “the work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts.” It was an unwieldy sentence to grasp, but Trow was explaining something the public could intuitively sense: The way the world was presented through media was increasingly detached from the way the world actually was. Technology was advancing faster than the human condition.
