The Rural Purge
In Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuahn refers to America as a culture where
the death of all the salesmen at one stroke of the TV axe has turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite unacquainted with itself.
Now, I think that he’s wrong, because hey. Disagreeing with McLuahn in general is kind of how you get started in media studies, even as you recognise the dude was right about a lot of stuff. Still I think he’s wrong in the idea that TV, in the 1960s, represented the death of salesmen (because sales and advertising are very different creatures).