Your reading assignment for next week is an essay (actually given as a talk) by Neil Postman, the late media critic and educator, titled "Informing Ourselves to Death."

For this assignment, you should identify what you feel to be the key points in this piece and present an argument either in agreement with or in opposition to Postman's ideas. Put another way, you'll be answering the question "are we informing ourselves to death?"

Note on plagiarism: I regard plagiarism - taking and presenting/using another's ideas as your own - as the most base form of academic dishonesty. At a minimum, any assignment which I find to be plagiarized in whole or in part will receive a grade of zero; particularly egregious instances of plagiarism may be cause for failing the course.