People of a television culture need “plain language” both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.

Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.

America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.

Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration.

The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

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