Television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.

We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.