No Politics is Local Now, by Stephen P. White

In his 1985 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman offered a critique of the social and political changes brought about by the ubiquity of television in American society. Metaphors tell us what something is like, and, according to Postman, our media (print, radio, television, etc.) operate a lot like metaphors: they “classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.”

Postman’s problem with television was not that it conveys unserious or false information (though it often does that), but that the constraints and tendencies of the medium itself shape the kinds of things we are capable of saying and understanding about the world through television. Television creates in us an (often unexamined) expectation that reality ought to conform, indeed, does conform, to the sorts of things that make for “good television.” …