In this essay for the moderate magazine Politisk Tidskrift, Hans Bergström gives his critical observations on the effects of changes in media use on culture, civic understanding and democratic maturity. It was written in 1999, when the transformation from text to pictures was about to be followed by an even larger move into the internet society. At the time, one could only speculate about the wider consequences of this latter transformation. The outlook from the then editor of Dagens Nyheter was dominated by a degree of worry and cultural pessimism concerning the new mediated reality.