Information Without End

The volume of new knowledge published in every field is enormous and exceeds anyone's ability to keep pace. Everyone today fears that they are under-informed.
* In its 50th year, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. added more than 950,000 items to its collections!
* Even the English language keeps expanding. Since 1966, the English language has gained more than 66,000 words -- equal to half or more of most other languages.

Info Overload at Every Turn

The reality of our times: information overload at every turn. In the last 12 months, in the U.S. alone:
156,000 books were published
1,120 new magazines were launched
7,200 movies were offered on DirecTV
218,000 programs were televised.
658 films were produced

Decide now to only choose the best of information and communication resources; you simply don't have time for the rest!

The Peek-a-Boo World

Professor Neil Postman in his 1985 landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death offers a brilliant portrait of how television consistently offers us a false view of reality. Here is an excerpt from the start of Chapter 5, "The Peek-a-Boo World":

"Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange."

"There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane."

"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms."

"Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. This is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago."