Ezra Klein has some great book recommendations for understanding how social media, cable news and technology are rewiring our brains. Marshall McLuhan is nearly impenetrable, but Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” (2010) and Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1985) will open your eyes.
To Klein’s list I would add two more: “Communication as Culture” (2008), a collection of essays by the media theorist James W. Carey, and “Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art” (2016), by Virginia Heffernan, which I reviewed for GBH News back in the day.
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When I taught journalism at Emerson in the early ’90s, I found that students responded well to Postman’s book, even as many continued to “amuse themselves to death.”