To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second  half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Tipography and the ascendency of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irrevercibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly differently cannot acommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television.

The Kennedy/Nixon debates, 1960

What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H.G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

excerpts from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman

https://neilpostman.org/