Different Kinds of Information

"[Neil] Postman's great concern is the inundation of meaningless information created by electronic media . . . Information must be immediately useful, purposive, or it's no good. But what is useful to one person is dross to another. Under Postman's scorn for mere information lurks good, old-fashioned social snobbery. We need not worry about people's being swamped by useless information. They will pick out what is germane to their needs. Their psychological marketplace will work as it always has. But it is a wider marketplace now. We are free to make up our private reality from a much, much wider public one. We are paying a new kind of attention to attention-structures. We have come to recognize that different people make up different realities." (Richard A. Lanham The Electronic Word 242).

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