I was particularly amused by a recent Boing Boing post by guest editor Maggie Koerth-Baker, which was simply a pulled quote about how the telegraph was destroying journalism from an 1891 issue of The Atlantic Monthly:
"America has in fact transformed journalism from what it once was, the periodical expression of the thought of the time, the opportune record of the questions and answers of contemporary life, into an agency for collecting, condensing and assimilating the trivialities of the entire human existence, [...] the frantic haste with which we bolt everything we take, seconded by the eager wish of the journalist not to be a day behind his competitor, abolishes deliberation from judgment and sound digestion from our mental constitutions. We have no time to go below surfaces, and as a general thing no disposition."
Like one of the commentators responding to the post, I'd also recommend everyone in the known universe reread Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death."
