Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry b… - Al Gore

In the early days of America’s democracy, education and literacy were the prerequisites for establishing a connection to the body politic. In a world where communication was dominated by the printed word, those who learned to read also learned to write. Gaining the ability to receive ideas was automatically accompanied by the ability to send ideas, expressing your own thoughts in the same medium through which you took in the thoughts of others. The connection, once established, was two-way. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The art of printing secures us against the retrogradation of reason and information.” In practice, the use of the printing press was mainly by the elites in America’s early decades, and the scurrilous, vitriolic attacks of that age certainly rivaled the worst of any modern political attacks. Nevertheless, the easy accessibility to the printed word opened up avenues of participation in the dialogue of democracy for people like Thomas Paine, who had neither family wealth nor political influence — other than what he gained with the eloquence of his writing. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television — a distracting and absorbing medium that seems determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates. If the information and opinions made available in the marketplace of ideas come only from those with enough money to pay a steep price of admission, then all of those citizens whose opinions cannot be expressed in a meaningful way are in danger of learning that they are powerless as citizens and have no influence over the course of events in our democracy — and that their only appropriate posture is detachment, frustration, or anger.

The flight insurance example highlights another psychological phenomenon that is important to understanding how fear influences our thinking: “probability neglect.” Social scientists have found that when confronted with either an enormous threat or a huge reward, people tend to focus on the magnitude of the consequence and ignore the probability. Consider how the Bush administration has used some of the techniques identified by Professor Glassner. Repeating the same threat over and over again, misdirecting attention (from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein), and using vivid imagery (a “mushroom cloud over an American city”). September 11 had a profound impact on all of us. But after initially responding in an entirely appropriate way, the administration began to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism to create a political case for attacking Iraq. Despite the absence of proof, Iraq was said to be working hand in hand with al-Qaeda and to be on the verge of a nuclear weapons capability. Defeating Saddam was conflated with bringing war to the terrorists, even though it really meant diverting attention and resources from those who actually attacked us.

The planet is in distress and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton.