Last week I wrote:

I still wonder about (and this is an aspect of what I would call the illusion) the proposition about its massiveness as it relates participation. I do not think I can receive through the internet massively though I participate as a small part of hugeness of the flow into it. It is a broad and raging river and I have a bucket on a rope called Google. My dealings with it have a large measure of chance associated with it. I find I live in a part of it which is familiar but I sometimes worry is not the most relevant to me yet can never know due to the scale and uncertainly that is still part of the unmapped only searchable internet. As perhaps a pre-internet nerd I don't think I had that concern. My imaginations were met by the pace of the resources available to me.

When I was back in university 1989, my Saskatchewan roommate prophecised upon the TV, at the room we were all in - loudly incanting W.O. Mitchell and some of Lawrence Welk jointly - that the images in videos were the images of insanity in 1960s movies, the quick-edited absurd scenes, flashing. He wasn't wrong. He was loud. In the New York Times on Saturday there was a review of sorts at B7 of American Mania: When More is Not Enough by Peter Whybrow:

I think we've shot though happiness as one does in hypomania and come out the other end, and we're not quite sure where we are. In fact, I think happiness lies somewhere behind us. This frenzy we've adopted in search of what we hope is happiness and perfection is in fact a distraction, like mania is a distraction.

But I don't know if this book is (or maybe also is) the video or the roommate?