A Metaphor For A Metaphor

While reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman I realized something interesting. Over time, slowly our world has become infatuated with abbreviations and metaphors. But has this happened over time due to the sudden increase of technology or has it always been like this? I think it has always been like this, humans are always trying to find the fastest way out to get things done. We abbreviate everything in our minds to make an easier way to remember things. Postman has pointed out that the media is taking away experience and making everything easier to process, yes that is true, but those metaphors, although they signify something to us, they take away the details. Like Postman said in chapter two, "Thus, Athens becomes a metaphor of intellectual excellence, wherever we find it; Hamlet, a metaphor of brooding indecisiveness; Alice's wanderings, a metaphor of a search for order in a world of semantic nonsense." Our minds have already made metaphors for us but when the media gives us a metaphor to remember another metaphor is that when it gets bad?