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Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

2025-09-22

Tags: History · Media · Technology

At its core the book lays out how the shift from a typographic centered communication society to a image centered communication society has redefined the very epistemology of civilization. Before radio, photography, the telegraph, and television (not to mention the internet), the only way people communicated, excluding orally, was via the written word. A book, as the piece de resistance of the typographic age, meant a number of things in and of itself that the modern telecommunications lack. A book, or more particularly the ideas a book holds, are wrestled into their final form over months or years as the author distills their thoughts, rearranges their arguments, and hones their presentation into a final lucid concept as they imagine how the future reader might react. Telecommunications holds no such claim and instead distills its ideas into an acceptable for, free of all context, to be enjoyed as entertainment for the lowest common denominator of public fool, culminating with the eventuality that entertainment not on usurps information, but that is *becomes* information itself.