Today's media

"A river that slowly has been polluted suddenly becomes toxic...(27-28)"

So Postman's metaphor is saying that television is the "pollutant" of our minds, which is the "river." Postman also says that television has "great emotional power(29)" and can turn us one way or another in our opinions of things. After reading this, I think to myself that if this book was written around the late 80s, early 90s, then how much more polluted have our minds become now? Postman believed that the "pollution" of our "rivers" has reached critical mass and now our minds are "toxic." If this is true, then what will become of future generations? Especially with the media today targeting younger and younger viewers and all the sex, drugs and violence you see on television, what kind of society will become of it all in the future. I think that today's media will do more harm than good because with television, there are corporations behind all the programming who fund it and other corporations advertising through it so what shows up on the television is partly dictated by the greed of corporations selling their products. As with the printing-press and typography, those were more or less for informational purposes and therefore they wouldn't be as corrupt as as television which is perceived as more or an item of entertainment rather than information. Now when people say the phrase "mind numbing television" I take it a bit more seriously because I think that that's what's becoming of our people today and today's media is doing more harm than good.