“The primary effect of radio is to disorder further our picture of the world by diminishing the opportunity for genuine selection (in its system of programs it has achieved a ‘rationalization’ which results in the wildly irrational). One skims through a newspaper, practicing a certain art of rejection; the movie he may stay away from, but the radio is insistently present; indeed the victims of this publicity are virtually hunted down. In few public places do we escape it, and our neighbor’s loud-speaker may penetrate the very sanctum of our privacy. In our listening, voluntary or not, we are made to grow accustomed to the weirdest of juxtapositions: the serious and the trivial, the comic and the tragic, follow one another in mechanical sequence without real transition. During the recent war [World War II] what person of feeling was not struck by the insanity of hearing advertisements for laxatives between announcements of the destruction of famous cities by aerial bombardment? Is it not a travesty of all sense to hear reports fraught with disaster followed by the comedy-variety with its cheap wit and arranged applause (this applause, of course, tells the listeners when to react and how and so further submerges them in massness).”
~ p. 102
Ideas Have Consequences
Neh 