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

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.

Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

[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)

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)