The article analyzes Don De Lillo's novel White Noise in order to detect a convincing account of late-modern life-forms, characterized, as they are, by the domination of commodities and mass-media, first of all television. Among the many possible topics, I have chosen to focus on the disappearance of the 'human' from a world saturated by things, the perception of "second-order levels of existence" behind the ordinary plot of events, the ambivalence of technology, according to which "greater it's the scientific progress, more primitive is the fear" and, last, the dimensions of catastrophe and emergency as ordinary life conditions.