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

by Neil Postman

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

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.

Yet Sesame Street and its progeny, The Electric Company, are not to be blamed for laughing the traditional classroom out of existence.

What the hell is this guy talking about