The critic Michael J. Arlen recognized the profound moral implications of this arrangement more than 40 years ago: the manner in which, for example, the propagandistic early coverage of Vietnam helped build public support for the war. Like Trow, Arlen regarded television not as a window onto the actual state of the world but a set of corporate-carved keyholes offering fragmented and often misleading visions.

It’s painful to read Trow or Arlen today because their intuitions about the effects of visual mass media have proved so eerily prescient. Our latest innovation, the Internet, was hailed as an information highway that would help us manage the world’s complexity. In theory, it grants all of us tremendous narrative power, by providing instant access to our assembled archive of human knowledge and endeavor.

In practice, the Internet functions more frequently as a hive of distraction, a simulated world through which most of us flit from one context to the next, from Facebook post to Tumblr feed to YouTube clip, from ego moment to snarky rant to carnal wormhole. The pleasures of surfing the Web — a retreat from sustained attention and self-reflection — are the opposite of those offered by a novel.

We haven’t lost the capacity to tell stories. Artists and journalists and academics still work heroically to make sense of the world. But theirs are niche products, operating on the margins of a popular culture dominated by glittering fantasies of violence and fame. On a grand scale, we’ve traded perspective for immediacy, depth for speed, emotion for sensation, the panoramic vision of a narrator for a series of bright beckoning keyholes.

This may be true, in its own way, of every age. But ours presents unprecedented risks. At the level of the individual, our lives have become unmoored from traditional sources of meaning, our families of origin and hometowns and spiritual beliefs. We’ve lost not just our sense of identity and belonging — Madison Avenue has been all too happy to peddle us those at a profit — but the story of what our lives are supposed to mean. At the level of the species, we’ve harnessed science and technology so effectively that we now face at least one verifiable existential threat, in the form of global climate change.

In the past, our nation has been summoned to social progress by leaders like Lincoln and F.D.R. and Martin Luther King Jr., who served as narrators of a larger story about the American experience, our sins and duties and moral potential. Last summer, President Obama conceded that he had failed to “tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism.” He needed to be a better narrator.

This is a laudable goal. But even if Obama tried to tell such a story, would we be able to hear it? Or would we hear only the bits and pieces run through our chosen media filters — filters designed to neuter the force of any larger narrative by snipping it into sound bites?