A newsroom where I used to loiter in the early 1980s had, like many newsrooms, more than its share of eccentric brain power, and so it was that the beginning of a mysterious list appeared one day -- posted anonymously and entitled "The Age of Diminishing Literary Returns."

The culprit who started the list had written, underneath the title and on an otherwise blank sheet of paper, "#1. Stendhal's 'The Pink and the Grey.' Then, a coy #2. "inviting further contributions.

He or she had chosen wisely: By giving an ironic nod to the 1830 French classic The Red and the Black, commentary had been made (the world has paled since the age of Romanticism; the whimper has outdone the bang), the rules had been drawn, and the bar placed high. Now it was up to the rest of us.

Within 48 hours, the list was a marvel: Dickens's "A Tale of Two Strip Malls," Faulkner's "The Whisper and the Irritation," Dostoevski's "Misdemeanors and Reprimands." Finally, after the list had spilled over onto a second page and become modernized with entries like "Rabbit, Skip," somebody told us to go back to work.

But the greater point, about grandness being replaced by tepidity or mediocrity, has lingered over the years, with alarming reminders of it popping up recently in the hollow confines of advertising and cyber space. You might call it a dilution of cultural values: We now live in a society where information is available at the touch of a keyboard in half of the homes in America, and yet no one knows what to do with most of it. Everything is free, but nothing has much meaning; the instruction book that used to teach us such things -- that gave form and definition to raw data -- seems to have disappeared.

In the ensuing semantic void, hyperbole has rushed to fill the vacuum; the one sure way to rob something of its worth is to overstate it. Nowhere is this more evident than in advertising. Goods and services are being shilled with slogans that promise the moon, or at least space travel -- "Are you ready?" and "Where do you want to go today?" -- but offer only numbing uniformity. The worst of them have taken to appropriating great historical events: A soft-drink campaign alludes to the fall of the Berlin Wall (freedom of choice!); a local weekly newspaper, comparing its complimentary circulation to a sermon by Martin Luther King Jr., slaps a billboard with the ludicrous reference, "Thank God almighty, it's free at last."

This impoverishment of history, while disheartening and even offensive, is part and parcel of what the mass-culture soapbox of advertising has always been about -- using what's already there to sell you what you don't yet need. But the hipster soullessness of the message has been ratcheted up a notch with the onslaught of the new gimme economy and the hundred-car pileup on the information highway. And you can find softer, less public analogs -- with two-dimensional, linear thought replacing complexity -- in the classrooms and chat rooms of everyday life. In a cluttered realm where Internet access has made every screw ball's Web page a potential archive, style has ridden roughshod over content, and content itself is no guarantee of meaning. Just try executing a search online without benefit of ironclad parameters. You'll get triple-digit results that deliver only eyestrain. Signifying nothing, indeed.

Throughout history, jeremiads have accompanied technological innovation, usually until the new system -- railroads, industrialized labor, television -- has hauled society, however grudgingly, into a different and often better world. So it is and will be with the global village. The technology isn't to blame; it's the indiscriminate pitch accompanying it -- and the subsequent replacement of old-fashioned analytical skills with high-tech ones.

This trade-off came home to me last winter, when, giving a guest lecture on critical writing, I assigned a review of a well-known foreign film. The students were a bright group who had already shown they could write and do research; a review, I hoped, would demonstrate their abilities to think for themselves. It shouldn't have surprised me when, Web-savvy to a fault, they arrived with completed papers bearing every actor's name spelled correctly, as well as background information on the film. Their diligence was troubling because of what it obscured: the absence of much unalloyed argument. One of the best students drove home the point. "You mentioned something about aesthetic standards," he said. "And I really didn't know what you meant."

I believe this was my failure, not theirs: In seeking an unadulterated ideal of pure opinion, I had neglected to realize how rare such a thing is these days. I had wanted to teach my students how to establish their authority as writers: how to locate their beliefs on the epistemological map, then trust what they found there and crystallize it into prose. Set loose on a virtual sea of information and attitudes, they had no idea how to fish for the truth.

I might have insisted they turn off their computers and read Swift, or Orwell, though the writer this incident called to mind was more contemporary. In his 1995 novel, Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers has his tech-courant protagonist facing the bottomless depths of the Web. "When the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot abused child on line," he thinks, "and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it."

Where do you want to go today? When you get there, will you have any idea where you are, or how to get back home?