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Neil Postman
In 1985, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, and tried to warn us about how were squeezing every kind of information and communication through the warping passage of one medium: television. Journalism, education, politics, even religion were all being forced through that same conduit. What came out the other end proved to be, time and time again, entertainment first and foremost. Different mediums of communication shape and prioritize different kinds of information, but television's effect is turn it all into amusement, gratification, distraction. Postman traces this development far back through different media like radio, the telegraph, and print advertising, and forward to TV and early personal computers, and shows us just how different human communication has really been at different times in history. Fast forward thirty years, and we see Postman's critique become even more relevant rather than less: if he had lived to see the rise of reality TV and a reality TV star becoming president, he may have had many reactions, but I doubt surprise would be one of them.
Postman sees Brave New World as emblematic of the dystopia we're moving toward, than the better-known 1984 by Orwell:
But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think.
But I would add Fahrenheit 451 as well, with its boundless entertainment, education via TV, and shallow, show-business politics.
"Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. [...] One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in midair, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!"