Al Gore and TV Culture

I was deeply impressed with this excerpt from Al Gore's new book The Assault On Reason from Time Magazine. It's heavily Amusing Ourselves to Death influenced. It makes a half-hearted diversion into being an advocacy paper for net neutrality in the closing paragraphs, but that may just be an artifact of reformatting the book into excerpt form, because prior to that turn the excerpt appeared to have a rather grander design. I'll be curious to see reviews of the whole book. I think Gore diagnosed the problem pretty well here, and I surely hope net neutrality is not the entirety of his answer. I have to concur with Andrew Sullivan, I much prefer the new public intellectual version of Al Gore to the old political candidate version. I hope he doesn't let himself be dragged into the 2008 race.