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2755 Chris Hayesyou hear something wildly wrong. %u201cThe F.D.A. hasn%u2019t approved it, but also there%u2019s a whole thing with fertility. I read about a woman who had a miscarriage the day after the shot.%u201d And then something offensive, and you feel a desire to speak up and offer a correction or objection before remembering that they have no idea you%u2019re listening. They%u2019re not talking to you.Then, inevitably, you hear someone say something about you. Someone thinks it%u2019s weird that you%u2019re always five minutes late for the staff meeting, or wonders if you%u2019re working on that new project that Brian started doing on the side, or what the deal is with that half-dollarsized spot of gray hair on the back of your head. Injury? Some kind of condition?Suddenly%u2014and I speak from a certain kind of experience on this, so stay with me%u2014the thrill curdles. If you overhear something nice about you, you feel a brief warm glow, but anything else will ball your stomach into knots. The knowledge is taboo; the power to hear, permanently cursed.It would be better at this point to get rid of the fennec ears. Normal human socializing is impossible with them. But even if you leave the room, you can%u2019t unhear what you%u2019ve heard.This is what the Internet has become.%u2022 %u2022 %u2022It seems distant now, but once upon a time the Internet was going to save us from the menace of TV. Since the late fifties, TV has had a special role, both as the country%u2019s dominant medium, in audience and influence, and as a b%u00eate noire1 for a certain strain of American intellectuals, who view it as the root of all evil. In %u201cAmusing Ourselves to 5Death,%u201d from 1985, Neil Postman argues that, for its first hundred and fifty years, the U.S. was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium %u2014 in the form of pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons %u2014 structured not only public discourse but also modes of thought and the institutions of democracy itself. According to Postman, TV destroyed all that, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was, in a very literal sense, meaningless. %u201cAmericans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,%u201d he writes. %u201cThey do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.%u201d . . .I thought, and many of us thought, that the Internet was going to solve this problem. The rise of the liberal blogs, during the run-up to Barack Obama%u2019s election, brought us the headiest days of Internet Discourse Triumphalism. We were going to remake the world through radically democratized global conversations.That%u2019s not what happened. To oversimplify, here%u2019s where we ended up. The Internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that, for too long, had been controlled by far too narrow a group. But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to pre-TV logocentrism. The brief renaissance of long blog arguments was short-lived (and, honestly, it was a bit insufferable while it was happening). The writing got shorter and the images and video more plentiful until the Internet birthed a new form of discourse that was a combination of word and image: meme culture. A meme can be clever, even revelatory, but it is not discourse in the mode that Postman pined for. . . .101French for black beast, this idiom refers to something disliked or dreaded.%u2014Eds.Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.