Neomi ’s Reviews > Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business > Status Update

"........what is televised is transformed from what it was to something else, which may or may not preserve its former essence."

"Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham or even Albert Einstein, and what will most likely come to mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely on a television screen. Of words, almost nothing will come to mind ( in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture."

"To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another."