In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman quotes a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…we are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will lead through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

In my introductory article to this series, I argued that, in the socially saturated context of online media, social justice discourse frequently functions as a means of fashioning and maintaining our public image.