Inventing Contexts for Diversion

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 76:

“the crossword puzzle become a popular form of diversion in America at just that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact...Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, not they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use”