People In Distress Will Sometimes Prefer A

Americans No Longer Talk To Each Other, They Entertain Each Other. They Do Not Exchange Ideas, They Exchange Images. They Do Not Argue With Propositions; They Argue With Good Looks, Celebrities And Comercials.

We Are More Naive Than Those Of The Middle Ages, And More Frightened, For We Can Be Made To Believe Almost Anything.

My Argument Is Limited To Saying That A Major New Medium Changes The Structure Of Discourse; It Does So By Encouraging Certain Uses Of The Intellect, By Favoring Certain Definitions Of Intelligence And Wisdom, And By Demanding A Certain Kind Of Content - In A Phrase, By Creating New Forms Of Truth-telling.

. . . Americans Are The Best Entertained And Quite Likely The Least Well-informed People In The Western World.

If Politics Is Like Show Business, Then The Idea Is Not To Pursue Excellence, Clarity Or Honesty But To Appear As If You Are, Which Is Another Matter Altogether.