English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Here's a link to a talk given by Neil Postman. If you've never read him, he's a whip smart kinda guy, and has a lot of interesting points of media criticism. Here's his abbreviated take on information overload. You'll find it much more pessimistic than Lanham-- I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

http://www.frostbytes.com/~jimf/informing.html