Now... this is the title of Chapter 7. The Now, This mentality leads to fragmented news with no context. News shows choose attractive people to tell their audiences terrible things, and this leads to not looking for people with credentials, but people with nice faces, ones that are "likable and credible." They frame the program with music at the beginning and end to set a mood, to help dissociate viewers from the seriousness of whatever the news is. Television news is not constructed to make the viewer think of the implication of the news.
In some ways, Postman argues, television is anticommunication. Television that is informative has only a niche audience, and follows typographic discourse. Because of this, Postman says, Americans are easily the best-entertained and least-well-informed people on the planet. This leads us to a Huxley-esque Brave New World style universe, where we want gratification more than anything else and it's readily available.
How does "now... this" culture perpetuate mean world syndrome?
Are there any ways that the world is like 1984?
Has the media further desensitized us from the time Postman wrote his book?
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