amusing ourselves to death cartoon

This serious cartoon is a well rendered depiction of some aspects of the final chapter of Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Although nothing beats reading the whole book, the final sentence of Postman's book is a fine summary:

For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking

Some more extensive earlier discussion notes about the question of whether technology is making us dumber or smarter: our intelligence