Amusing Ourselves To Death - Chapter 5

Chapter 5 - The Peek-a-Boo World 

1. Who's idea was it to have country wide news??

2. What did Thoreau mean when he said telegraphy was making relevance irrelevant? 

3. What does photography mean? Writing with light.

4. Why did the crossword puzzle become so popular?

5. What is the difference between a telegraph and a television. 

REACTION: 

It is interesting how they refer to tv as an annihilation of space. The amount of information we are fed daily usually does not alter our daily plans and lives whatsoever because it has nothing to do with us. So what is the point of even having it? All of the information we are fed help us create our opinions on our world problems and clutter our head with this information, that we can do absolutely nothing about. News is pointless unless it is in your demographic. This is funny because I have actually quit watching tv because it is mind numbing and a waste of time for me. I would watch the news or a tv show and just be like what am I doing? The purpose of the telegraph was to move information at a fast pace and over a broad area. Quality of the content just became less and less important, and now our society is almost hypnotized by it. 
Language is the basis of all means of public communication and discourse, so photographs and telegraphy were very hard to accept because the only words it they had were what you remembered from the broadcast or what you interpreted it as. 
The only way to live is in the present, but photography causes us to live in the past and the future. Seeing became the basis of believing instead of reading, and it revolutionized the human race. Photographs now provide context and content for something that you write. It almost makes the words come alive, and have even more meaning. 
They compare tv to the game peek-a-boo because events pop in view for a moment then leave but when they are there they are somehow entertaining. But we overlook the fact that everything that happens on tv we think is the truth. And when things our visual, it just makes it that much more believable.
People were able to predict the revolution of media 50 years ago and were very accurate, so it is very interesting to see if today's predictions will be correct.