As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

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

Build an "inclusive narrative" that goes beyond race, class, religion, etc., so that all may participate in the "the great debates".

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

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)

Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.