Within the Context of No Context, which was edited by New Yorker editor William Shawn, was published in book form in 1981 accompanied by Trow's profile of music mogul Ahmet Ertegün. In 1997, "No Context" was reprinted with a new introductory essay, Collapsing Dominant.
In "No Context," Trow pointed out the role of television in the destruction of American public culture and Americans' sense of history. "Middle-distance" institutions that had long given Americans' lives real contexts (such as fraternal organizations, bowling leagues, and women's clubs), had disappeared as people stayed home to watch television. Their replacements, television shows, were false contexts designed to be just compelling enough to keep people watching. What remained as real contexts for Americans to live in were "the grid of two hundred million" (the U.S. population at the time) and "the grid of intimacy" (the immediate family). Celebrities had a real life in both grids, and only they could now be complete. Deprived of real context, everyone else now wanted to be celebrities themselves.[7]
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