Amazing ourselves to death chapters 5 - 9

The second part of the book focuses on variety of things. It starts of with the "Breaking the News" in which discusses the decline of news viewing on Television. It discusses how the network and cables news programs select and prioritize content based on audience appeal and especially on visual appeal, as opposed to prioritizing based on importance of the subject matter and logical arrangement of content. The quality of news has deteriorated with time. Hardly, 20% of the news is relevant and sensible enough these days.  News that create sensation are chosen over the news that are relevant and that matter to people. The book also discusses how have the ways of debating and campaigning changed over years which is quite interesting. The new media has changed almost every sector of the society including the government. Neon Gods discusses how a televised church service or a sermon preaching has taken a form of amusement rather than being spiritual in its format. Any program pertaining to God with a preacher giving a speech actually conveys an indirect message that preacher is above God because he is the one on the screen throughout the show stealing the limelight which doesn't belong to him. It is rightly mentioned in the chapter that a sense of the sacred is lost in favor of the profane. Grand theft education focuses on how a traditional form of education has been dwarfed by the online education, how writing on paper via pen has been replaced by learning to write using computers. It reads, "the process of making a cultured man does not depend upon the transmission of knowledge, but upon the manner in which the knowledge is transmitted by the teacher". Hence it is the method that is adopted by the teacher to impart knowledge which is more important than the teacher himself. The simile drawn by the Prof. Strate in the book with the Tempest is really interesting. The best time I experience is when I am on flight all alone. Because that way I am unplugged from the world. I do not have to bother about responding to anybody's messages, any body's calls. Those 20 something hours are the most relaxing. I get time to think about lot of things which I do not prioritize in favor of something or the other which is not really important. Lastly, I agree that we need to balance out things. We can continue to amaze ourselves but at the same time we need to indulge ourselves in intelligent conversation. Only that way, we can overcome the fear of public speaking or writing that has engulfed us in past few years with the emergence of new technology.