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

Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose.

[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. (68).

[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)

People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

Voting is the next-to-last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge, of course, is giving your opinion to a pollster.

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