Remember Max Headroom? The stuttering, digitized alter-ego of telejournalist Edison Carter (both played by Matt Frewer) starred in a short-lived but often brilliant eponymous TV series that first introduced a cyberpunk aesthetic to a mass audience. In many ways—enough to fill a separate blog post—it was shockingly prescient. But in one central way, the world of Max Headroom got things 180-degrees wrong: It imagined television as the dominant, even defining force in American life. Broadcast behemoths were the undisputed kings of the corporate world&mdash.arguably the country—and the Morlocks and Eloi in this shockingly stratified United States were equally anesthetized in television’s hypnotic cathode glow. Computer networks existed, certainly, but largely as plot devices, unintelligible to all but the elect of the high geek priesthood.

I thought of this during last weekend’s camping trip, when it happened to come up that a friend and I had both chanced to read a largely forgettable book by Bill McKibben called The Age of Missing Information. McKibben, whose primary market function seems to be persuading affluent progressives that there would be something spiritually ennobling in getting away to the house at Martha’s Vineyard more often, spends the book alternating between relating his observations from analyzing the full content of 24-hours of broadcast television with the nuggets of folksy wisdom gleaned from a day hiking and camping in the Adirondacks. It is as pointless and self indulgent an exercise as you might imagine—you can probably reconstruct the main points he went in to prove without actually repeating either half of his exercise—but McKibben was working in a fairly popular genre of television alarmism, the best-known example of which was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman, a disciple of seminal (and famously gnomic) media theorist Marshall McLuhan, was intellectually in quite another league than McKibben. Yet even his jeremiads now seem not only dated, but almost quaint, like the pronouncements of some Victorian futurist on the contours of a new world shaped by steamboat travel and vast networks of pneumatic tubes. His dire warnings about the “idiot box” are striking now less for being off base—Postman hit on many genuine insights—than for being irrelevant. The great threat to Western culture and democracy is this outmoded video delivery system? I’ll be sure to panic as soon as I’m done fretting over global cooling and the looming world famine. Then I’ll dust off my TV set and bash it in with a Pet Rock.

I say all this not to have fun at the expense of public intellectuals for lacking some kind of plasma-screen crystal ball, but to note how often cultural critiques that seem to center on the intrinsic properties of a technology are often really grounded in an unduly dim view of human behavior. If you think people will sink into some kind of mediated torpor at the first opportunity, then any technology can be expected to recapitulate all the worst aspects of television—recall early fears that, once the Internet became a mass medium, it would turn into nothing but a combination strip-mall and cineplex. On slightly sunnier assumptions, however, people will make creative use of more participatory media when they’re available, and demand richer fare from television, as the boom of smart long-form dramas with extended story arcs has shown. Yes, different technologies have different intrinsic properties that facilitate different kinds of communication, but it’s always a mistake to take the viewer or user out of the equation, or to lazily assume the kind of unreflective passivity implicit in terms like “viewer.”