If I was reading this book in 1985 or 1995 or even 2005, I'd give it five stars. Reading it today, I vacillated between wishing that Dr. Postman was around to write something similar about social media (I long to hear his evisceration of Twitter) and being glad that that poor man died before he had to confront the current reality. He didn't deserve that headache.

Frankly, the best way to read this book is to apply the questions he asks about television to social media. The answers you arrive at are terrifying but necessary. The medium is the message and the metaphor, of course, but it also shapes the way we think and talk to each other. It sure would be nice if we started thinking about how these technologies would affect us before we let them totally take over our lives, but I guess that's too much to ask of humanity.