Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings.

Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people - a conversation with no one and yet with everyone. What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand?

. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

It is inescapable that every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not. A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and technology taketh away.

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.