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Community
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that we’ll be overwhelmed by “information glut” until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as we’re being amused.
standard. Communities have been replaced by demographics. Silence has been replaced by background noise. It’s a different world.
Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
make better cars than the Americans, know that economics is less a science than a performing art, as Toyota’s yearly advertising budget confirms.
what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.
clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.
What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch.
disdain rhetorical rules, to speak one’s thoughts in a random manner, without proper emphasis or appropriate passion, was considered demeaning to the audience’s intelligence and suggestive of falsehood.
“truth” is a kind of cultural prejudice.
Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.
Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.
that the form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be.
People of a television culture need “plain language” both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law.
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?
have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.
book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past.
photograph also lacks a syntax, which deprives it of a capacity to argue with the world.
For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for believing.
is the only use left for information with no genuine connection to our lives. And that, of course, is to amuse.
The problems come when we try to live in them.
We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend.
the question, Does television shape culture or merely reflect
What is television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce?
Even commercials, which some regard as an annoyance, are exquisitely crafted, always pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music. There
what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.
Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art.
Indeed, many newscasters do not appear to grasp the meaning of what they are saying, and some hold to a fixed and ingratiating enthusiasm as they report on earthquakes, mass killings and other disasters.
My point is that we are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the “Now . . . this” world of news—a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished.
Entertainment Tonight, turn information about entertainers and celebrities into “serious” cultural content, so that the circle begins to close: Both the form and content of news become entertainment.
makes her followers extremely happy and confirms their predisposition to believe that prosperity is the true aim of religion.
Through such acts, a gymnasium or dining hall or hotel room can be transformed into a place of worship; a slice of space-time can be removed from the world of profane events, and be re-created into a reality that does not belong to our world.
Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not abstractions into our heads.
television commercial is the most peculiar and pervasive form of communication to issue forth from the electric plug. An American who has reached the age of forty will have seen well over one million television commercials in his or her lifetime, and has close to another million to go before the first Social Security check arrives.
that in a world of television and other visual media, “political knowledge” means having pictures in your head more than having words.
is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.
Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening “now,” which is why we must be told in language that a videotape we are seeing was made months before.
mindless inattention;
