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First of all, excellent work!
I'll be including this essay on my dorm room door next year.

Humans are exposed to more information on a daily basis than they have in all of history. There is an overwhelming amount of information that is being fired at you, and you have to make very rapid choices about it (see also: thesis, antithesis, synthesis).

I think you are missing a key component of the madness of the present.  Not only are we being bombarded by amazing amounts of new information everyday, but that information is often completely decontextualized.  Just look at the average television news broadcast.  They present sensational stories on a variety of topics in short segments usually not much longer than 45 seconds.  There is no relevance to previous stories and little background information is given on each subject.  The information is not put into any sort of context, preventing the viewer from gaining an authentic understanding of any subject or even being particularly concerned with what has been shown to them.  Any opinions gained from such small bits of information are essentially subjective as the event is only inadequately shown from one point of view.  The result is that everyone ends up with a clusterfuck of fragmented "Trivial Pursuit" information with no way to create a meaningful worldview using all (or even most) of it.  Its no wonder our culture is made of "bits of shrapnel" juxtaposed in weird ways when our values, opinions, and beliefs are exactly the same, strange arrangements of decontextualized psuedo-knowledge. 

I probably shouldn't have written this at 2:30, I apologize if it makes no sense.  And yes, I have been reading "Amusing Ourselves to Death."

Penises.

I think a good example of this would be some elements of the Christian fundamentalists.  Y'know, the ones the government is oppressing by not allowing them to organize prayer in schools and academia is oppressing by alternately suppressing and ignoring creation science, and the media is oppressing by essentially declaring a war on values and trying to flood their homes with sex and depravity, and Wal-Mart is oppressing by saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, and the gays are oppressing by indoctrinating their schoolchildren with the Day of Silence.