This is from Neil Postman, a famous cultural/media critic from his 1984 book. I wonder what he would say about television now...
"I raise no objection to televison's junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measue a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of imporant cultural converstaions. The irony is here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging televison to do. The trouble with such people is that they do not take television seriously enough. For, like the printing press, television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric."
-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 16-17.
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