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

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. . . we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to ...

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

Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation. The learner must be allowed to ent...

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

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of...

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

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

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

This 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. In the shift from party politics to television politics, the same goal is ...

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

The modern idea of testing a reader's "comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending?

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

To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense...

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

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions

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

In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

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

Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without con...

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

We rarely talk about television, only about what’s on television

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