| Title | : | Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 014303653X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780143036531 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 184 |
| Publication | : | First published November 25, 1985 |
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Reviews
-
This really is a book that needs to be read. I’m going to start with the quote that got me to read this book:
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
Both of my daughters have had to read Huxley and Orwell in high school. I didn’t read either of them when I was in high school, which now I think about it is very strange. Anyway, both of my daughters have told me that when their teachers asked the class about Huxley’s Brave New World which of the two worlds available in that book they would choose to live in, virtually everyone picked the brave new world with drugs and pneumatic women. I guess that is hardly surprising, except, of course, that Huxley’s point does seem to be that one should at least question a world in which we amuse ourselves to the point of being incapable of thinking.
This book could easily have been a manifesto calling on all Americans to unplug their television sets and, in true rock star fashion, throw them out of the window. But that isn’t what is being called for here. Postman’s objective is seemingly much more modest (although it is interesting to note even this modest objective is no where near having been achieved). He wants people to reflect on how the new technologies of media presentation (particularly television) are fundamentally changing what we take to be ‘news’ and what we take to be ‘informed debate’, particularly informed political debate. For example, we may live in an age where a black man can become president, but do you imagine for a minute that an overweight man of any colour could?
About a year ago, I guess, I read a book called Fooled by Randomness which advised people to not read newspapers every day for financial information as the daily swings in the stock market were essentially random and therefore meaningless and so the explanations for these swings provided by the newspapers were only more so. This has had me thinking about the value of most of what I read in newspapers now. In fact, I’m finding it increasingly hard to read newspapers. This book is set to make this problem of mine even worse.
He gives a fascinating account of the development of news since the telegraph and how the telegraph in particular changed the world. Yes, there are all of the standard points about the telegraph as a boon – it made the world a much smaller place and helped create the global village. But what is really interesting is how the telegraph turned ‘news’ into something that was no longer local or of immediate relevance to the lives of those reading it, but rather into a series of ‘facts’. He talks about people in the United States learning of Queen Adelaide’s whooping cough…
I’ve never studied ‘media studies’, but I think it would be a very worthwhile thing to do, particularly if students of media studies look at the effect various ‘media’ – print, television, telegraph, internet – have on what ‘content’ is to be presented.
Naturally, there is quite a bit of discussion on the fact (and the implications of the fact) that television is a ‘visual’ medium. What is more interesting is that it is a medium that gets viewers to see the world as essentially chaotic, discontinuous and without context or history. He makes the interesting point that you can come to a program (any program) on television without any prerequisite knowledge. Now, think about that for a moment. Days of Our Lives can run for decades and yet you can start watching it for the first time tomorrow and there will be virtually no ‘costs’ to you for doing so. He points out that this is true of any and every program on television – even ‘educational’ programs like Cosmos The issues with television presenting us with a passive interaction with the world are only one part of the problem; this issue of context free, prerequisite free information is at least as troubling.
He also talks about Lincoln having debates that lasted, and were attended and listened to by interested voters, for seven hours – three hours a piece for each side to present their case and an hour’s rebuttal by the side that went first. In a world where the sound bite is the ‘reasoned argument of choice’ of our politicians, talk of an era where people expected sustained, logical discussion on a topic seems almost bizarre. We think about a world where anyone would spend seven hours of their own time listening to political debates as incomprehensible. In a world at least a hundred times more complex and frightening than Lincoln’s – you know, they didn’t even have nuclear weapons way back then – the fact we are not even prepared to send seven minutes on issues of real import is very troubling.
His discussion of the effect on us of news segments lasting only 30 seconds (virtually despite the importance of the item) and the fact that it is impossible to focus on any particular news item for more than the allotted 30 seconds due to the fact that no sooner have you become aware of it than the next one is upon you crowding it out, means the news on television ends up a series of items of trivia which have no direct importance to the lives of anyone watching it.
His discussion of religious television is worth the cost of the book alone. You might expect, coming from me, that I mean he is an atheist. He isn’t. But he makes some very interesting points, not just about the fact that religion on television rarely quotes Jesus as saying things about rich men, camels or eyes of needles (which I can only assume was added by some Commie to the Bible over the actual text which obviously said ‘Jesus wants you to be rich’). But he also points out that a religious experience requires you to step out of the profane world and enter a world that is, in at least some sense, holy. However, television requires, and perhaps does not even allow, any such transition to transcendence. I think this is a fascinating idea. He also points out that televangelists are actually the stars of these shows, and God is just someone that gets constantly mentioned, but is never actually present. God’s absence is particularly evident given that this is a medium dominated by images. It is hard not to agree with Postman that given the second commandment about not making graven images, televangelism is probably blasphemous as it is Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and Co making graven images of themselves – that is, after all, the central point of the medium.
This book is a quick read, but no less important for that. In one of his previous books, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, he says one of the main objectives of teaching is to provide students with a bullshit detector. His own detector is highly tuned, sensitive and virtually unfailing. -
As I sit down to write this, President Trump has just described Frederick Douglass as "someone who has done a terrific job that is being recognized by more and more people." (February 1, 2017).
Frederick Douglass was an African American abolitionist, writer, and reformer who died in 1895. Apparently, the President of the United States has no idea who Frederick Douglass was, since he is referring to Douglass in the present tense.
I have been struggling to understand how Trump got elected. Not just because I disagree with his political views, but because he is, quite frankly, woefully uneducated. Not only is he woefully uneducated, but he apparently also has no desire to educate himself now that he is President - not even with intelligence briefings.
What happened? How has this country gone from Founding Fathers who were intellectual giants - including Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison - to someone who literally cannot be bothered to read a book? And why, exactly, does so much of this country find this to be a perfectly acceptable state of affairs?
Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" offers a deeply compelling thesis as to how and why America has slouched so pitifully towards ignorance. As he puts it, "We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover."
Postman argues that in the early America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the printed word had a monopoly on discourse, attention, and intellect because that was all people had. Most Americans never even laid eyes on their leaders - they knew them only by their printed words. That is to say, Americans only knew their leaders by their public positions, their arguments, and their knowledge as codified by the printed word.
Today we don't know our leaders by their words so much as by their faces - thanks to the modern monopoly of visual media - the television and internet. In early America, participation in public life required the capacity to negotiate the printed word and mature citizenship was not conceivable without sophisticated literacy. Now? Who cares. As long as you look good on TV and can speak in easy-to-understand 30 second sound bites, you're good. In fact, Postman writes, modern public discourse does not (and really cannot) appeal to the public's reason as it did in early America, because the disjointed nature of television does not allow for such a sustained level of discussion. Can you imagine a modern American cheerfully listening to a presidential debate for between 5 to 7 hours (as they did in Lincoln's time)? Can you imagine them doing it in person, without pictures of any kind?
Visual media has transformed us from a typographical and deeply literate society to one in which we are dazzled by a constant stream of flashing pictures and music that instructs us how to feel. There needn't be much coherence in this visual world because we are endlessly entertained by it and it is so adept at eliciting our emotions. Visual media has such a monopoly in modern America that many Americans don't end up voting for leaders whose knowledge and reasoning appeal to them, but for those who make them feel a certain way.
This book was written in 1985, so obviously it didn't discuss the most recent U.S. presidential election. Its theories, however, were easily extended. It explained (to me, at least) why so many Trump voters cannot articulate the political philosophies that convinced them to vote for him, but rather they point out how he made them feel. Trump never even fully articulated any of his political philosophies during the campaign. But people had seen him be "a successful business man" on a reality TV show in which he hired and fired people (even celebrities!), he obviously has lots of money, and his stump speeches appealed to their feelings of dissatisfaction with how the world had treated them - so they felt he must be a good leader who understood them. Many of Trump's voters also "didn't trust Hillary," although I rarely heard it explained why. The explanations I did hear almost always had less to do with her political philosophies, and everything to do with their feelings about her. A far cry from the intellectual discourse of eighteenth and nineteenth century America.
This was one of the most fascinating and illuminating books I have read in years. I believe it gave me an understanding of current events that I desperately wanted and needed.
Five massive stars.
An all-time favorite.
Most highly recommended. -
*A brief ‘update’ of sorts or rather some thoughts that I think might relate*
I recently had a discussion about dreams and how when I was younger we were taught people do not dream in color, which was something both of us felt wasn’t true of our own. So I read up more on it and discovered those studies had come after the advent of television but before color tv was common, yet, as you can read about in
this study, after the 1960s people ‘color was found to be present in 82.7% of the dreams.’ In 2003, a study reported ‘ early descriptions of dreams and treatises on the nature of dreaming suggest that colour was commonly present in dreams before the 20th century.’ So what has been theorized here (the article goes on to examine the difficulty in certainty) is that black and white media modified how we experience or how we perceive to experience dreaming. Movies and tv tend to play on our emotions in a more intense and prolonged way than other visual media so it would make it reshapes our dreams.
So what am I rambling about here? This got me thinking about Postman and all the ideas on visual media and society reflecting each other back and forth and how one might update these studies in 2023, particularly with ideas of literature. David Foster Wallace (who would have loved that dream article) spent a lot of headspace on this sort of thing, with
Infinite Jest in particular embodying a lot of the theories. So anyways, hear me out. When I was younger and exploring tv shows it was usually through reruns that I would see completely out of order. People around this time experienced narratives often having to pick up context clues as to the relationships between characters, usually not knowing the full backstory to certain things, and recieving stories pretty interchangeably. There wasn’t much context outside episodes. To be fair, shows then were a lot more episodic than the more frequent one-continuous-narrative of shows today and you could miss episodes and not be left out (I remember LOST and 24 being some of the first big ones where it was ESSENTIAL to not miss, and Battlestar Galactica to some extent).
But I’m curious if this is what lead to the way to this day I still don’t mind seeing a show in sort of a jumble because I’m so used to that and not needing much context to enjoy, and I also enjoy books that way. I also completely understand why it is frustrating to some but things like characters lacking names or places not being identified, scenes not being in order, lack of quotation marks, etc. are often things I don’t even notice in books and I wonder how much that relates to the ways we’ve taught ourselves to consume media? Maybe this is highly individual but I’m curious how it works for others and I wonder if there has been anyone looking at the way we receive media series and how that shapes the literary culture. Do readers often want more context? Are books more often linear? We now can start a show right at the beginning and binge through it whereas when I was younger it was common for there to be years before I ever saw the first episode of a show I loved. I have no answers, just curious if anyone has noticed any trends and how it might relate to social media and tv consumption. I have seen rumblings of twitter from authors on how publishers through the years want authors that come with a social media following and, more recently, looking for books that have higher ability for content creation on tiktok, so in that way I think things have been reshaped. And its all for better or for worse, and change is natural, so I’m writing this less as judgment but more just curious to follow if we can detect or study how it works. If anyone has any insights I’d love to discuss.
Anyways heres my original review from years ago:
-----
‘What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.'
The modern era is an age of endless information and entertainment. Media looks to the public for what they want, and then sells it back to them wrapped up in the most irresistible packaging they can create, and we eat it up. However, if entertainment is what we desire most, and if everything we receive must compete for our attention, what happens to the so called serious information we need? Does religion, education, politics, and any other form of society get turned into entertainment as well? Like the deadly cartridge in
Infinite Jest, are we letting ourselves be destroyed by what entertains us, what gives us pleasure? Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death takes a look at our infatuation with television and technology and examines how the changes in the ways we receive our information affects our public discourse and society. ‘Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us,’ Postman writes, ‘Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley was right.’ Through an analyzation of historic American society juxtaposed with modern examples of politics, education, religion and general society, Postman examines alterations in American culture through our shift from print based media to visual based media.’It is my intention to show that a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense….[W]e do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.’
Postman alters Canadian media philosopher
Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism ‘The media is the message’ to his often repeated ‘the media is the metaphor’ idea, simply meaning that the media offers us a metaphor of our own reality and that everything we see through it pulls with it a large array of implied context and framing of information that is controlled by those who deliver it. Everything we view has been spun, even if unintentionally, to reflect some believed context of our culture. Postman argues that ‘in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself,’ and the unspoken content of media is captured in our minds and grows into our culture through our actions. It has resonance in our culture. ‘Definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed.’ For example, we see a character on television that we like and we try and be like that character in our own lives ¹. All news information is somehow framed in a certain light, as is anything we receive through television and broadcast companies. ‘The weight assigned to any form of truth-telling is a function of the influence of media of communication.’
Postman compares the modern era with the times when all information was print based. ‘To exist was to exist in print.’ This section was extremely interesting, especially for any lover of books and the written word, as it emphasizes the power of print in an era where the author and the philosopher were rock stars. Postman, relying heavily on Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America, shows staggering statistics of literacy rates (‘between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for males in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite possible the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time’), emphasis on the importance of education, and a look at how heady works such as Paine’s
Common Sense were top sellers and widely read (‘Common Sense sold more than 100,000 copies by March of the same year. In 1985, a book would have to sell eight million copies [in two months] to match the proportion of the population Paine’s book attracted’). He shows how people would sit through eight hour political debates and how the language in political discussions was written at a much higher education level than those of today yet still understood by most literate Americans. In short, Postman attempts to show that the average person in the 1700’s had a better grasp of language and utilized it for more sophisticated purposes than people of today.
Through his idea that a change in media creates a change in culture, Postman tackles several different subjects through the course of the second half of his book. Politics, religion and education are shown as having succumbed to the temptation of being made into entertainment. Postman argues that visual media makes the image more important to its receiver than the actual message, and that television is a passive activity instead of an activity like reading that requires some work and thought by the reader. His look at politics argues that a print-based mind, when asked to think about a politician, would focus on his words and political beliefs/platform, whereas a visual-media mind would focus on the person’s appearance and charisma. He supports this with a reflection on the Nixon/Kennedy debates where those who listened to the debate on the radio fingered Nixon as the clear winner, but television viewers placed Kennedy as the clear winner. Kennedy was young, handsome and charismatic while Nixon’s image, having been recovering for an illness and opposed to the idea of wearing any make-up, made him seem haggard and unfriendly. ‘As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.’ For religion, Postman argues that televised evangelicals bastardize religious beliefs: they remove all the spiritual transcendence, theology and ritual and place the preacher as the focus. ‘God comes out as second banana.’ As I have just completed an extensive presentation and essay on this chapter, I will spare you most of the details, but it highlights that religion of television is more aimed at the wallet than the soul, more focused on celebrity status of preachers and guests than holiness, and gives people what they want instead of what religion is about: what people need.
Essentially, Postman argues that television gives messages that are trivial, and these shows get high ratings. ‘Or rather, because their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.’ Even shows bent on education ultimately teach children that they love television, not that they love learning (most want to cuddle Elmo, not letters and numbers), as well as offer a flawed attempt at education (focusing on reading as sounding out letters instead of reading being the understanding of words and their order to form a sentence that purveys a message). What makes shows work is the ‘stickiness factor’ (this is more from another book we are discussing for this class, Gladwell’s
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference), focusing on the characters, music and sounds that catch attention and make us remember. Postman also shows how news broadcasts, in order to compete, must offer a level of entertainment and become nothing beyond flashy visuals, effects, sounds, music and beautiful talking mouths that spin us a story.
Postman shows how televised media creates what he calls the ‘peek-a-boo world’.’A world where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained…also endlessly entertaining.’
We are bombarded by information at all times in a three prong attack on the epistemology of our time: Irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. Information may be cathartic, but usually most of what we hear doesn’t really relate to our personal lives other than something to talk about, we can’t do much of anything about the information, and has no context to our lives. To further discussion on context, Postman cites Susan Sontag’s work
On Photography, where she writes ‘the point of photography is to isolate the image from context, so as to make them visible in a different way… all borders seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated…all that is nessesary is to fram the subject differently.’ Television, as discussed earlier, frames everything in some manner and gives us only a pseudo-context, or a doctored context to make us think a certain way. Television focuses us on the image more so than the information.
This book, read for class, is an interesting investigation into our obsession with entertainment and the effects of television in our world. While it was written in 1985, Postman’s message is still poignant today. It must be taken with a grain of salt, however, and while it is well written, Postman’s insistence on ‘this is what I want to say/not say’ is a bit unnecessary and seems as if he is unsure of the reader’s ability to follow along. Also, he does occasionally imply causation when what really exists is correlation, but, if anything has been learned through this book, the reader already recognizes that any information received has been fixed towards reinforcing the message desired by the deliverer. Some of the material is rather outdated however, and it should be noted that this reflects Postman's 1985 and our modern day is a bit different, better in some ways and worse in others. I wish Postman would have gone more into society outside of television as well and how that has changed, such as how products like even books and music are geared more towards the easy message and pure entertainment as opposed to higher artistic standards. There could have been a great chapter examining how this stems from television, or perhaps this is all stemming from a human desire to do what is quick, easy and painless, and Postman's television arguments are actually an extension of that. Who knows. There's a book for someone to write in there somewhere. All that said, Amusing Ourselves to Death is a very thought provoking book that will make the reader hyper-aware of television and its effects in their lives. This is a must for any fans of David Foster Wallace as well. The book is best served alongside other media/culture criticisms, especially Gladwell’s Tipping Point, and having studied it for a course made it all the more interesting. ‘For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in
Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.’
3.5/5
¹ In the class for which this book was assigned, we discussed how shows like Friends and Seinfeld were different from most previous shows as they focused on a circle of friends instead of a family, and instead of family morals much of the plot focuses on the characters moving through sexual partners, which would then imply to impressionable viewers that this is the type of behavior that makes one ‘cool’ like a person on tv. This is a terribly juvenile and seemingly old-person ornery and prude example, now that I see it written down, but you get the general idea. For a more interesting example of, think of how that classic Claymation
Santa Claus is Coming to Town hides pro-hippy (it was 1970), anti-establishment (and potentially pro communist?) sentiments in a children’s film.
'Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business.'
There is an excellent interview with Postman discussing the ideas in this book
here
Or, a wonderful PBS documentary we watched in class highlighting Postman’s ideas:
Literacy Lost -
Well, yes, Mr Postman. You're undoubtedly right in much of your analysis. And I suppose it was prescient of you to be so right way back in 1985 when you wrote this book.
But having said that, I'm not sure what else to add. Here we are in 2009. Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of the state I live in. But the republic hasn't fallen. The barbarians are just an annoyance, not a threat. Newspapers may be undergoing a steep decline, but it would be premature to declare this a complete tragedy. I read books. All of my friends read books. Hell, I've even co-authored a scholarly monograph.
But guess what? I also have a subscription to Entertainment Weekly. I was stricken at the death of Max, George Clooney's potbellied pig (and probably the living creature who spent most time in bed with George, when you think about it). My favorite television show last year was "America's Most Smartest Top Model". I have a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics. I love "The Tool Academy".
I guess what I'm saying is that, even though your analysis may have been spot on, it still left me with one major question unanswered.
So what? -
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world.
In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control.
Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights.
Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment. ...
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز شانزدهم ماه آگوست سال 2012میلادی
عنوان: زندگی در عیش ، مردن در خوشی؛ نویسنده: نیل پستمن؛ مترجم: صادق طباطبایی؛ تهران، اطلاعات، 1391؛ در 351ص؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م
نویسنده در این کتاب به دنبال روشن ساختن و تبیین کیفیت بهره گیری و استفاده قدرتهای بزرگ و وابسته به کانونهای اقتصادی و سیاسی جهان برای سلطه فرهنگی بر جوامع بشری است؛ نویسنده باور دارد که رسانه های بصری به ویژه ماهواره و تلویزیون با برنامه های تفریحی و طربزای خود، عامل انهدام فکر و اعوجاج اندیشه در مجموعه عناصر فرهنگ بشری است؛ ...؛ هر نویسنده نظری دارد، این نیز دیدگاه ایشان است
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 02/08/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی -
I think this was my introduction to Postman and I read this book in a day; it's 163 pages. Yes, I like to read, but even so back then with two little kids, I rarely read that much in month much less a day! I had two nearly-hyperactive (okay yes they were girls) kids of four and five. I only mention this so you know just how big an impression this book made on me at the time.
Up until then I frequently resorted to letting the kids 'do' videos several hours a day--not that they would ever sit still for them--they just had them playing in the background. Like many parents, I suppose, I figured, 'what was the harm?' Not after I read this book. I also stopped watching the news . . . and stopped despairing over the world situation.* We shut off the TV. Period. Life got much quieter around our home. In fact, we reclaimed our home. Postman shows you chapter by chapter how the media runs our lives and how our 'professional entertainers' are the least amusing people in our country.
I cannot stress strongly enough how profoundly grateful I am for this book for showing me and teaching me all it did when it did. There's no doubt in my mind that it's because of changes we made in our home then, that our daughters are the good students and strong readers they are today.
Thanks Neil!
P.S. And I love the cover picture!
* There are better sources for finding out what is actually going on in the world than the nightly network news. I'm not advocating dropping out of society and/or becoming a total recluse. -
"This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." - Neil Postman
In 1854 Stephen A. Douglas presented a three-hour speech against Abraham Lincoln's ideas, and in return, on that same night, Lincoln responded with a three-hour argument of his own. The surprise? People actually stayed long enough to hear both men out.
Contrast that with the Republican debate that happened last night: 8 candidates were forced to answer leading, disjointed questions in 30 seconds or less. And they were given little if no time to respond directly to another candidate. Plus, there was this: "Sorry, but we have to cut you short to go to a commercial break."
Postman's point in Amusing Ourselves to Death is that the TV has turned public discourse into little more than entertainment. Politics, news, and religion all turn into mere amusement when they're on the TV. Postman's point might be summed up best by Ronald Reagan: "Politics is just like show business."
If anything, everything Postman critiqued about American society in 1985 has been amplified in 2011. We are more disjointed and fragmented than ever. Political TV is more like entertainment than ever. Every time I see a clip from FOX News there's a banner across the bottom blaring ALERT ALERT ALERT—not to mention all the other flotsam streaming across the screen. That stuff is there to make the news feel like an action movie, and it's reason enough to turn that channel off.
Postman argues that all this fast-paced, disjointed news makes us think only of the now. We think we're informed when in reality we know just enough to have an emotion about who "won" last night's debate. The talking heads don't wrestle with history and substantial ideas (you can't do that if you're constantly interrupted by commercials); the talking heads just hack at hackneyed phrases and parroted arguments. After all, wrestling with real ideas requires real thinking, and the point of the TV is to help you stop thinking and be amused.
To this quote and many others from the book, I say, True enough:
"How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? . . .
"What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them."
The solution? Read more. In a book there are no commercial breaks. You can wrestle deep with an idea for three hours at a time and come away with real knowledge. -
Amusing Ourselves to Death is the spiritual sequel to Boorstin's The Image. Postman wants us to realize that there is something inherently inferior about the information we consume through visual media. Forget television designed for entertainment - which is at least honest - and focus in something like a news segment. As far as its creators are concerned, the worst thing that it could possibly do is inspire or provoke you, two horrible emotions that risk you getting up and leaving your living room and missing the imminently scheduled set of commercials. The result is the unreality we find ourselves in, one where no one can recall the last time they actually DID anything with the information they were given from the television. You realize that the last thing we have to fear is a malicious Orwellian news industry, because what we have is so much worse: culture incentivized to be as shallow, fabricated and captivating as possible, at the expense of what is actually real or true or meaningful.
-
I read this book in preparation for my third reading of DFW's Infinite Jest because I am a crazy rabid fan of that book and Amusing Ourselves to Death is often referenced by critics as parallel to DFW's big points w/r/t media/entertainment/culture. Here are Mr. Postman's own words:
"To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television." (8)
"...I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist." (27)
Big thumbs up to Postman for his tone--I love to read a good screed, and Postman's good at rallying the bookish crowd in favor of things they already believe to be true. But I wonder at the consistency of his argument; he goes to great lengths to explain that the media available for relaying information directly shapes the form of communication and indirectly shapes the understanding thereof (i.e. a completely oral culture by necessity preserves and shares information by spoken word and memorization is therefore a highly prized skill, while cultures that write don't value the ability to memorize nearly as much, plus they have the bonus of returning to a primary text for later discourse available in a way strictly oral cultures do not). But he stresses that this doesn't mean a person from an oral culture is any less intelligent than a person from a writing culture; merely that their intelligence is used in different channels. So, by extension, why exactly does he declare a televisual culture to be inferior to a written culture? He does some hand-waving about not needing to engage in symbolic understanding like you do with words on a page and not needing to exercise the discipline to hold your focus for as long a period of time. He beats the dead horse of "TV is passive and reading is active" but overall it seems to be more a gut feeling than an evidence-backed conclusion. Postman doesn't provide us any double-blind test findings, any PET scans of brain activity, any references to direct evidence that TV is inferior to reading and directly contributing to a corrosion of society and discourse as a result.
3 stars out of 5. Thought-provoking and energetically written, but there's something of an "echo chamber" feel to it. I mean, I believe it, but if I didn't already I feel like I wouldn't be fully convinced by this book alone. Also, some of the topics he spends time on are a little dated, like televangelism (which gets a full chapter-length exploration). -
If someone held a gun to my head and asked for a precise and concise definition of irony (it could happen!), I would say only this: Neil Postman died two days before Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor -thus narrowly missing out on the single best example of what he was screaming about all those years ago. This book was foundational for me. Postman delivers a passioned polemic about the entertain-at-any-cost ethos of our current culture, and how the irrestible siren song of triviality is more dangerous to our democracy than any demagogue's propaganda. Here he is in an interview describing television as the great destroyer of context:
“Television is a medium which lacks a because. What I mean by this is that language has embedded in it all these becauses. This happened because that happened. Television doesn’t have a because. How many people, when seeing a newscast about, say, a serious earthquake or an airplane crash, will actually start to cry or grow silent at the tragedies of life? Most of us don’t, because right after the story about the airplane crash, there’s going to be a thing for Burger King or, if not that, a story about the World Series or some other event that would basically imply, ‘don’t take this story about the airplane crash too seriously, it’s just something to amuse you for the moment.’ So I think that goes a long way toward promoting the idea that there is no order anyplace not only in the universe, not on the planet, not on your continent, not even in your home or your town.” -
So penetrating and prescient. If only he were alive to analyze the age of social media.
-
Can’t believe this was written in 1985. It feels like Postman knows of Twitter and Reddit and all the other 2019 news media outlets and social media platforms.
He has some fascinating points, and somehow seems to predict the future. It’s about television, but it’s really about the Internet, before the Internet existed. An easy, short read, packed full of insights. Would recommend.
Read raffaela's 4-star review of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... -
This book makes two good points: the media used to communicate affects the nature of the communication, and much of modern communication on serious matters is frivolous.
That covers the first part of the book. The rest is a tiresome rant about how TV is ruining us all. The details of the rant are not worth covering, but I do think that Postman misses some important points. First, he never looks to see if there is any good in a visual based communication style. It is true, as he states, that a medium such as television emphasizes emotional impact over rational argument, but emotion can be a powerful motivator. An image of the damage from an earthquake or a hurricane can inspire someone to help when a description of the damage may not. Even on a rational level, a picture can be worth a thousand words as anyone who has ever tried to learn knitting can tell you.
Postman only gives the slightest of nods to the fact that textual communication can also be banal. See your favorite social network for more details.
A better approach than Postman's, which declares that TV is bad and text is good, is to realize that different communication mediums have different strengths and weaknesses. Television is excellent at providing entertainment, but that is not the only thing it is good for. No media should be the only mode of discourse. Ideally, they should be used to support and reinforce each other. -
There's a good feeling you get when you read a book that accurately criticizes something that needs it. If you've ever felt like watching TV was a waste of time, this book will impart such a feeling.
Not to mention, providing an arsenal of reasons why TV is a general waste of time.
Why, just two days ago my 3rd grade students asked me why the 4th graders at our school always get to watch videos in class and we don't.
With Postman's support in my back pocket I explained that TV was nothing more than entertainment. While there may be a great deal of programs on TV from which something might be learned, TV makes it appear as though all learning is or should be fun, when in reality a true education is wrought through critical thinking and some honest hard work. TV demands neither of these, and those who become accustomed to it exhibit similar behaviors when either TV or education (or perhaps anything else displayed on the telly-bunkum-box as just entertainment) becomes less than pleasing: switching off.
Entertainment is one thing, and that's fine. But education, news, politics, courts, science, and religion are another. TV, by its natures, rolls everything into show-business, and culture follows suit.
If reading books was ever important to you, read this book. -
Well I wish I could explain how much I loved this book in a short paragraph but I don't feel that I would do it full justice. A brilliant exposition of how new forms of information technology; without our consent or even active notice, have entirely rewired our culture. In effect, the explosion of visual media has made us demand everything from politics to religion to science be packaged as 'entertainment'.
Correspondingly, it has led to the trivialization of all fields of human endeavor in the eyes of the common person. It has made us a trivial, unserious people; the polar opposites of the learned and thoughtful ones who built the foundation of the rational societies we inhabit today. We have effectively sacrificed rationality on the altar of enjoyment, and are merely presiding over a crumbling edifice of other peoples' good ideas. Having said all that, this is not a jeremiad. The author doesn't condescend or insult the reader's intelligence. In fact, for a book ostensibly meant to decry the displacement by entertainment of all other human pursuits, he subtly reveals that he's actually a hilarious writer.
I'm several decades late to this incredible book but it feels as relevant as it must have been then, perhaps even more so. -
I don't know how many commentaries in our culture it could be said to be more relevant now than when they were written 25 years ago, but this one can. If we were distracted and distractible then, demanding television-style stimulation even on serious subjects, we certainly are now. Television's defining role has simply been replaced by stimuli from many different directions. Postman rightly cautions us to be wary of the impact of how a message is delivered on the message itself.
I was disappointed, though, that he didn't offer remedies or inspire a countering vision. Especially as someone who makes some Christian references, this seems to me to be an obligation. Is not Christ is still sovereign? Did He not use the format available to Him when He walked the earth, even with all of their limitations? He told stories in a culture that told stories. He celebrated festivals in a culture that celebrated festivals. He used the tools available to foment change, and some encouragement in this direction would have been nice. -
Good thoughts, but I recall a
comment to the effect that for every Amusing Ourselves-type book we read, we should read another book on God's marvelous gift of technology.
See
here for Alan Jacobs's assessment of why the Standard Critique of Technology has failed to change us. -
Anyone remember the pre-Internet days of the 1980’s when television was still king? That’s when this book was written, so for every rant author Neil Postman made against television, I was wondering, “What would he say now?” He lived till 2003, and a Google search will show you that he railed against the Internet, too, but he never lived to see the rise of social media and texting. What would he have said about summing up your personal news into 140 characters right alongside the world’s celebrities? Television squared, I suspect.
The thesis of the book is that television dumbed down our culture and democracy to such an extent, it is comparable to the fictional drug soma in
Brave New World. Dictators don’t need Orwellian fear tactics to quell the masses; just keep them happily entertained and distracted and they’ll never rebel. That is why, he argues, Huxley’s dystopian vision turned out to be much more prophetic, at least in the U.S., than Orwell’s.
One of Dr. Postman’s biggest problems with television is its detrimental effect on literacy. Following Marshall McLuhan’s adage that “the medium is the message,” he argues that as our culture became more reliant on images to convey information and less on print, it changed our very thought processes. The effect is much more pervasive than people reading less. People think less. They no longer patience for protracted logical discussions that don’t follow a storyline consisting of conflict, climax, and resolution. The news aims to present itself in the same dramatic, visually pleasing format as the TV drama. And that is why, Dr. Postman argues, the more serious and educational television tries to be, the more deceptive and dangerous it is.
Dr. Postman makes some excellent arguments, but he does come across as a bit of a curmudgeon, particularly in his attack on “Sesame Street.” He argues that in trying to make reading fun for little kids, the show implanted in them the unreasonable expectation that learning must always be fun. That, in turn, forced our school curricula to become entertaining or it would lose kids' already TV-shortened attention span. The effect, he argues, is as degrading to education as TV news is to our national discourse.
Once again, while I can see Dr. Postman's point, my understanding is that "Sesame Street" was created to salvage learning after television had its negative effects. It may have been a concession to the problem, but it was not the cause of it.
Also, I'm not entirely sure if our circumstances are quite as bleak as Dr. Postman made out. After all, thirty years after this book was published, someone is still reading it, and that’s in the Internet age. I’m sharing my thoughts about the book on the Internet right now. So if television dumbed us down, is the Internet, which requires some reading, smartening us back up? I wouldn’t say so about the Internet overall, but I do read more because of Goodreads. If Dr. Postman had lived, I think he would have been an author member.
So go ahead. Turn of your electronics and live in the moment. Our whole culture needs to unplug more often. But 100%? Even Dr. Postman recognized that TV and computers weren't going away. We can't beat them, and we have joined them, but the least we can do is become more conscious, critical, and discerning about how much digital/visual media we allow into our own mental space. -
I now believe there is nothing wrong with me
Excellent book, full of provoking thoughts. I've always felt so out of place for being a bookworm and a person who tends to think and speak slowly and deliberately (tends, there are exceptions.) I now realize that my speech and thoughts are patterned after the written word and that makes me anachronistic. I'm still odd, but at least I realize why. The recent virus pandemic has revealed the stunning weakness and softness of American culture. This book contains at least a piece of the explanation. We're in serious trouble and I have little hope for our future. Spiritual poverty leads to enslavement. -
If
Herbert Marcuse was alive today, he would’ve concluded that Trump is a creation of the fraudulent ‘Culture Industry’ that perpetually dupes addict consumers by conjuring up prefabricated fantasies about the endless promise of the ‘American Dream’.
Theodor Adorno first coined the phrase “Culture Industry”. Adorno warned of a western Culture Industry that blurred the distinction between truth and fiction, between the commercial and the political.
Neil Postman prophetically predicted the internet, memes, fox news, and the ascent of Trump - and his ilks around the world - in 1985. The goal of American propaganda is to manufacture consent by way of mass distraction. The problem is, everyone is suddenly too comfortable to revolt against the oppression of any kind. People are distracted by virtually every aspect of mass culture. Trump is clearly a product of a mass media age. In the words of one biographer, we are seeing, “Donald Trump playing Donald Trump”, while a psychologist has observed: “Trump seems supremely cognizant of the fact that he is always acting”.
The way he speaks and lies and bombards voters — this is a way of controlling people, especially people who don't have a [sense] of history. The same thing happened with Brexit/Boris in the U.K, and Modi in India. Mass media allows for a kind of collective hypnosis, and to some extent, that is what we’re seeing. Trump as the ultimate predator, with the access to an amplified medium, seduced enough voters to win because he was able to manipulate the images people watch within today’s electronic Plato’s Cave. There are many more intricate determinants here, but I really think it’s much easier to understand the rise of Hitler than of Trump.
We are buried under dense ignorance which is disguised as 'Information', confused by entertainment masquerading as 'News', distracted by a procession of lies and outrages and controversies, and inured to misbehavior and corruption that would’ve consumed past administrations.
Most importantly, we have lost control of our attention!
Cultural degradation can come either through the state tyranny, or through more insidious alien means that the public does not even identify; with the latter - the public loses its autonomy, maturity, and history, without even realizing it. Worse, they somehow celebrate the very cause of those degradations.
We are all, as Huxley said somwhere, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it. In almost every aspect of our daily lives, from politics to business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes, social patterns, and the psychology of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. We're governed, our minds molded, tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by people you've never heard of. Unfortunately, people take extreme stance with things like this, and collectively ignorance prevails. However, it wasn't like that always. Now it quickly becomes a
Red pill and Blue pill thing.
A while ago I was watching a debate on Youtube, where a Marxist thinker was talking about Trump and the political unrest that is happening. He said that he is horrified at Trump, that he is a catastrophe, but he is a result of some process; and this process is the disintegration, the failure of the Left. He said that he hoped with Trump, everyone will be shocked, horrified with this horror, and something will finally happen.
"This disgusting, filthy, imbecile, callous, vain man had to come because the left needed a shake. Only some kind of a shakeup of the establishement can save us." - He said.
He is a pessimist, but he was hoping for a revolution of a kind.
I don’t agree with the latter part of his statment. I sure do hope that it happens, but I don’t think Trump’s rise will lead to an actual substantive rebellion or even a revolution in consciousness. Trump is just a negation. He is a TV show for a country transfixed by the spectacle. There’s no predictive data on how a revolution would look like - if it happens, and I’m being a skeptical optimist here - in this age of Mass media. Noam Chomsy too disregarded this as a radical notion. He disagreed with this line of thinking, as this proposition is parallel to the thinking that begin in 1930s - to shake up the system to restructure it in a better way - the consequence of which was the Nazis. I second Chomsky here.
Reminds me of a Terry Pratchett quote. He said somewhere,
“Here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions.
They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.”
It feels Neil Postman is specifically speaking about us, right now, but this was published in 1985:
“When Orwell wrote in his famous essay
“The Politics of the English Language” that politics has become a matter of “defending the indefensible,” he was assuming that politics would remain a distinct, although corrupted, mode of discourse. His contempt was aimed at those politicians who would use sophisticated versions of the age-old arts of double-think, propaganda and deceit. That the defense of the indefensible would be conducted as a form of amusement did not occur to him. He feared the politician as deceiver, not as entertainer.
But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.
The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does
not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that "truth" is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant."
Enter Memes. Classic, Dank, Rage, Shit-posts, and so on. They are dark, and funny - but Postman was deeply suspicious of 'Jokes' themselves, especially when they come with an agenda. The swift narratives established by them, can be highly destructive and manipulative. Algorithms on social media is highly optimized for emotions with hundreds of data points, inconceivable for an average man (voter)
Memes also fuel the expansion of
The Overton Window.
Jokes, with their charms and their appealing self-effacement and their plausible deniability are helping people to do the messy work of democracy: to engage, to argue, and to run for the presidency of the United States, electing a - wait for it - joke.
“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . .
But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard?
Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?
To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?
What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?”
An article from NewYorker with the title
‘How Jokes Won the Election.’
Here is a really good critical report on
Media Manipulation (2019)
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."
-
I cannot think of a book that explains our recent election cycle or our current cultural malaise better than this one. Even though he ends by saying essentially that computer technology is not likely to make an impact on our culture, his ideas on the medium (his focus is on TV) changing thought, culture, and dialogue is dead on. We now have our first TV president, our first TV politics, and our first TV electorate. I found this book to be remarkably accurate in its foresight even though it must have been read during the time it was written as pure crank-ery. Postman is a great writer and thinker.
-
Powerful, important, everyone-must-read book.
The premise: the US has shifted from a society dominated by print ("the age of exposition") to a society dominated by TV ("the age of show business"), and the result has profoundly degraded politics, news, and all forms of public discourse. I had previously been skeptical of the "TV will destroy society" arguments, but after reading this book, there's really no doubt: society has changed, dramatically, and many of the problems we're seeing today (e.g., Brexit, Trump) are the direct consequence of TV.
Some of the key insights for me from this book:
1. The US used to be a society dominated by print and perhaps one of the most literate societies in history.
- In the 18th century, something like 90% of men and 80% of women in the US were literate, which was an astonishingly high percentage for that era.
- The US was dominated by print. Popular books reached a huge percentage of the population; newspapers were incredibly widespread; pamphlets were printed and circulated to spread news with astonishing speed; libraries sprang up all over the country; lecture halls, which held public readings of books and articles, sprang up too; even religious debates were done in writing and through careful reasoning (in fact, churches laid the foundations for most US education—hard to square that now with the way the church treats science).
- The point of education at the time was mainly to read, as reading was the main way to participate in society back then. All discourse, all discussion, all news, and just about everything else was done via print. The printed word was most people’s connection to, and model of, the world. It revealed the world line by line.
- America was founded by a group of very well read and educated intellectuals. It was arguably an entire society of well read and educated individuals. It's hard to square that image with the modern US!
- The format of political debates of the era was also print. This included both articles/essays published by the candidates (e.g., The Federalist Papers) as well as oral debates, where candidates would present their arguments by reading essays aloud to the audience (i.e., the oratory of the day was mostly done in a print style). In fact, the format of oral debates of that era is incredibly revealing: when Lincoln and Douglas had a debate, each candidate got 3 hours to present their arguments and 30 minutes for rebuttals, for a total debate time of 7-8 hours! This was not an unusual length for a debate of that era; the audience would stay for it all and participate regularly with cheers, applause, shouts of encouragement, etc. I can't imagine a modern audience having the attention span for anything anywhere near that long.
2. The US is now a society dominated by TV
- This book was written in 1985, and even back then, just about every household had a TV and it had replaced print as the main source of news, politics, and public discourse.
- Since then, the situation has gotten worse: the average American household has multiple TVs (with far more channels), spends hours per day watching, and does very little reading.
3. Different mediums—oratory, writing, TV—differ radically in how they prioritize and process information.
- Oratory: the most important things are memory and eloquence. Memorizing stories, proverbs, and sayings was highly valued, as you would make decisions on new situations by pattern matching them to situations you remembered from the past. And since all discussion was done in person, the way to succeed was through eloquence, passion, and emotion.
- Writing: the most important thing is creating a logical, rational argument. Memory is less important, as writing can store knowledge permanently, so you can always look things up; eloquence and emotion are less important, as when you're writing, the audience is invisible and imaginary. What matters with writing is grappling with ideas, reasoning skills, and logically ordered arguments: the author is forced to struggle intellectually to say something of meaning and the reader is forced to struggle intellectually to understand what was written and agree with or refute it. It's no coincidence that the rise of print happened at the same time as the rise of the age of reason. Moreover, the written word is typically better evidence for something (e.g., when doing research) than oratory, as most writing has gone through far more thought, editing, and reviewing before it reaches the world.
- TV: the most important thing is that what you're seeing is entertaining. Whereas reading requires your complete and active attention, TV is a more passive medium, where you're often doing other things at the same time (e.g., eating, cleaning, chatting with others) and you can change the channel at any time. As a result, the only TV that gets watched is the kind of TV that can grab your attention amidst all the noise, so it's all about spectacle, simple messages, no pre-requisites, and lots of bright lights and loud noises. In other words, it's all about show business.
4. The medium limits the message
- The key insight is that none of these mediums permit anything outside of their core area of strength.
- Oral discussions that aren't eloquent or don't resonate emotionally don't work.
- Writing without a central, logical argument doesn't work
- TV that isn't entertaining doesn't work.
- For example, you won't see long oral debates (e.g., like the 8-hour Douglas/Lincoln debate) or complicated arguments on TV (e.g., like the contents of this book); those are just too boring.
- In other words, the problem isn’t that TV is entertaining, but that everything on TV must be entertaining.
5. Because everything on TV must be entertaining, it's a poor medium to use for all of our public discourse!
- TV is transforming our entire culture into one of show business and entertainment. News, politics, education, and everything else TV touches are being turned into show business, and that's not a good thing.
- News: the primary requirement of TV news is not that it's informative, but that it's entertaining. We get beautiful, professional news anchors in the foreground; mood-setting music in the background; a barrage of news in the form of tiny, disconnected, bite-size segments ("and now this...") in the middle; and in between these segments, we get ads. The result is that we are taught not to take the news seriously: that horrible school shooting you just heard about must not be so bad, as 30 seconds later, you jump to a story about puppies, and 30 seconds after that, a fun advertisement for beer. It's not serious news and debate, but a spectacle. You're not informed, but entertained. In fact, it's worse: you're misinformed. Before TV (actually, before the telegraph), information could travel no faster than a person, or about 35mph. As a result, most news was local, had a direct impact on your life, and was actionable. Nowadays, news travels at the speed of light, and you get news from all over the world, most of which has no impact on you (seriously, when is the last time a news story made you change your daily plan?). Instead of information that has an impact on your decision making, you're bombarded with irrelevant trivia that drowns out everything else. Moreover, since each news fragment lives in a separate context, it's as if each one is a separate reality: a politician can say one thing here and a completely contradictory thing there, and as there is no logical connection between them (unlike in writing, where everything must be logically connected), we're somehow OK with it. That's how Brexit and Trump happened.
- Politics: politics has shifted from a debate over policies (in the form of written essays and articles) to pure entertainment. The most important thing is not what a politician does, but how they look while doing it. Instead of the 7-8 hour debates of the 18th century, modern debates give candidates just a couple minutes each, which isn't enough time to make any reasonable argument, and therefore turns modern politics into a series of sound bites, one-liners, and an obsession with looks and appearances. The first 15 presidents of the United States could've walked down the street and been completely unrecognized: in their time, they were known solely for their arguments and policies, as delivered through their writing. On the other hand, all modern presidential candidates must be celebrities, and are known for their looks and demeanor, as delivered through TV. Trump, for example, was elected primarily because he was entertaining.
- Education: TV is particularly ineffective for education. Anything taught via TV must be (a) entertaining and (b) visual. But in the real world, not all learning is fun, and many types of learning require tests, long-form exposition, equations, and other non-visual formats that don't work on TV. Sesame Street pretends to be an ally of schools and education, but rather than teaching kids to love learning, all it really does is teach kids to love TV. And after seeing TV education, normal schooling seems boring and inferior.
6. Other forms of media are copying TV
- Not in the book, as it was published in 1985, but my own personal observation is that the Internet has inherited many of the properties of TV, and made many of them worse.
- We get even more information, even faster, that has little to no bearing on our life.
- Instead of 100 channels, we have billions of websites, so the battle for attention is even more intense. The websites that win are not those that inform or provide value, but those that entertain the most.
- Attention span has gotten even shorter. We went from 7-8 hour debates in the age of writing, to 1-hour debates in the age of TV, to 3-second tweets in the age of the Internet.
- As a result of all of this, public discourse is broken. We no longer debate issues. We're no longer informed. We just seek out amusement.
- It's devastating and depressing. What can we do about it?
Quotes
I've saved some of my favorite quotes from the book:
“Alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
“It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.”
“A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.”
Honestly, I wanted to quote the whole damn book. See
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes... for lots more. -
“What Orwell feared was those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
More than 30 years ago, before we could even conceive of a personal internet or carrying powerful computers around in our pockets, Neil Postman made a chilling prediction the state of American discourse and politics in 2018. Donald Trump is so purely a product and consequence of the Age of Television. It is a gripping and somehow affirming read, backing up all that I have felt this year about wanting to get away from TV, Twitter and the rest of it. Surprised I had not heard of it till now; it reads quickly and is well worth your time. What remains to be seen is whether we can recover from our addiction to entertainment. -
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a frustrating and maddening book that might be better called Old Man Yells at New Technology and About How Things Were Better Before He Was Born. It’s considered a classic examination of the problems of new technology, which I find odd given how shoddily the argument is made. If this is an argument for books over TV, maybe write a better book…
First, the stuff I agree with:
Postman is 100% correct that the medium alters us and that we need to think deeply about how TV (and now, the internet and mobile phones) affects us and changes our perception of the world
Postman is also correct that all new technologies have negative consequences (though I would disagree with him that the negative consequences always outweigh the positive or the potentially neutral consequences)
Postman is an engaging, compelling writer who is probably quite funny and who I would have enjoyed (and found amusing) if I didn’t find his argument so ridiculous.
So, that’s about all the positives I can muster.
Postman so horribly cherry picks his evidence that things were better in 19th century America it’s a lesson in cherry picking. If you ever want to learn how to cherry pick your evidence to make it seem like you have facts backing up your argument, read this book! Here are some examples:
He talks about the vast extent of printing in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries but never, not once, focuses on most of what was printed – we are left assuming everything that was printed was of the level of the work of Tom Paine and the Federalists (which is why, of course, we read so much of the other stuff today)
He compares the sermons of religious leaders of the past with Televangelicals today and completely ignores that religious leaders would have been far better educated in the 18th and 19th centuries than the average person, compared to pastors today – comparing the same profession centuries apart is not actually giving us a good view; imagine if he had compared scientists, we would have received a very different image
He focuses specifically on the Lincoln-Douglas debates as if these were average examples of the way people spoke – is it possible that we study these so much because they were actually better than average? is it possible we only think they’re really good because of what Lincoln went on to do?
He never talks about what people did for entertainment in previous centuries, beyond noting that some people attended lectures (how many people do you honestly believe regularly attended 5 hour lectures?)
He is rapturous about American literacy levels in the 18th and 19th century and ignores them in the 20th.
It’s also worth noting that Postman doesn’t provide non-cherry picked evidence (i.e. some actual scientific research) until page 151 of my copy; this copy is 163 pages long.
Postman may have an argument (I don’t think he does, but he might) about technology distracting the average person from what’s really important (as if no one was ever distracted by “unimportant things” in the past) but this book does not present a compelling case because the evidence just isn’t there.
People were actually less literate in the 18th or 19th centuries, this is documented by hard to research things such as the literacy rate – that is to say, not everyone could read
It’s really hard to believe that everyone attended these lecture series he brings up, given the travel times involved; without evidence of mass attendance, how can we honestly believe it was anyone but the local elites who went to these lectures?
People have a wider general knowledge than they ever have before (I’m sure that was just as true, relatively speaking, in 1985)
Americans are, by some measures, much smarter than they were 100 years ago (IQ scores have been steadily increasing – I’m not saying they’re actually smarter, I just don’t know how “TV killing our brains” and increased IQ scores can be reconciled)
Postman was perhaps a little too early in his decision that TV was the worst thing since the telegraph as television (not television news) has generally improved markedly, and was even beginning to do so in his lifetime (I’m sure he didn’t notice)
Postman’s brief comments about the computer reveal him to be a luddite rather than someone with actual insight into the new technology. He says “I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology.” It only changed the world irrevocably, but it’s definitely overrated. The telegraph was more important!
Postman’s book is a well-written rant with very little evidence to support it – why is this particular book, which fails to make its case, inherently more valuable than a TV program? I don’t know because he couldn’t tell me.
Postman’s comments are often downright bizarre. He seems to think Sesame Street was poisoning generations of children. I watched Sesame Street like everyone else my age. Am I dumber as a result? Am I dumber than a 19th century American? Am I slave to television? (To answer that question: I haven’t had cable for 95% of the last decade…) Aside from the baseless claim that an educational TV show is worse than a dumb TV show like The A-Team, I find this idea insulting. It’s the idea that the latest generation is dumber than the previous generations because things are different. That’s really what he’s up to. He’s not actually giving us a thorough examination of the issues of television as “image over substance” (which so many people want to apply to the internet 30 years later). What he’s really saying is that because things are different for kids than they were for him, or for his parents or grandparents, things are worse. He pretty much refuses to acknowledge the possibility that things are just different – which implies both better and worse at the same time – and that things are always different for new generations, at least since the Industrial Revolution. (It’s likely true that this kind of inter-generational change was not common pre-Industrial Revolution.) If he hated the Industrial Revolution to the degree that he hates the telegraph (and I think I could have written my entire review on how much Postman hates the telegraph and why that’s a sign that he was just a mad luddite), it seems like this is a man who just doesn’t like change.
I am so sick and tired of these “everything is awful” books, TV shows and movies. As a Canadian living in Toronto, there’s pretty much no better time for me to have been alive. I am as lucky as anyone who has ever been born (who wasn’t born rich relative to others): I have access to better technology, I have access to better medical technology, and I live in a safe society. I still have my problems (to quote Neil Young: “Though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away”) but they are extremely minor compared to people who had to worry about living to 40 or even making it out of childhood. And I am aware of this fact because of technology. Technology has aided and abetted my learning, not hindered it. That may not be true for everyone, but nothing is universally positive. (Nor is anything universally negative.) Don’t waste your time with this rant. It’s not prescient like everyone says. It’s just another example of “The world is awful because change is awful.”
5/10
PS: I understand that there are probably a lot of people who feel like this book is particularly relevant with Trump’s election, given what it says about image over substance. And though what some of Postman says about political advertising is undoubtedly true, it’s worth noting that Mussolini was made El Duce before TV. And it’s worth noting that there have been lots of other terrible demagogues prior to Mussolini. Radio, film and now TV have only abetted these people, they didn’t create them. Believing that television news is the sole cause of Trump’s rise (and it certainly did contribute) is to subscribe to the same fallacious reasoning that Postman applies throughout his book: people were smarter in the past before TV, radio and the telegraph and made better decisions. There is zero truth to that. And if you have any doubt about that, read a book about the Thirty Years War or the French Revolution and then try to maintain that we're all worse because of TV. -
I read a paragraph of this? or a page? or a chapter? or most of it? What I read to the point where Postman said, basically that there is so much information out there that we can not or do not act on that it's pretty ludicrous to keep taking it all in. And I was like cool! I can finally stop paying attention to that war that they're having in that place and all that talk about those hungry people in that one country is now in one ear and out the other. And then I was like double cool cuz I know I'm not really going to do anything with the information in this book so I tossed it aside, congratulated myself for another adventure in nonfiction and moved on.
I do think about this book sometimes when I'm listening to yet another podcast on the mating habits of ear mites in cats or the failing economy of a country I've never heard of and all of a sudden it occurs to me that I'm not going to do anything with either bits of info and I forward the circle thingy, triangle and give a little nod to Mr. Postman and his wise words. -
This felt pedantic and dated and messy to me. Although I generally agree that TV can be bubblegum for the brain, I don't think he convincingly proved that it is fundamentally more pernicious than other media. With "creative non-fiction" even books on serious topics now are more entertainment than education of the electorate, so the "medium is the message" doesn't quite cover it. And he's saying newspapers were already ruined by the telegraph anyway. Also, the Lincoln-Douglass debates were a show as he describes them, so entertainment value per se is not really the problem anyway. Any type of information from town cryer to Internet can be corrupted or infantilized.
What would be more interesting is a look across countries or across geographical units in the US at the same time to see where people are more likely to vote, to be engaged, to be informed with accurate facts, etc. -
.
بسمـ الله...
درمجموع، نیل پُستمن، جامعهشناس آمریکایی و نویسندۀ کتاب میخواست بگه:
«هر تکنولوژی، ایدئولوژی مخصوص به خودش رو داره.»
به زبان ساده یعنی تلویزیون، کامپیوتر، شبکههای اجتماعی، فقط ابزار نیستن. بلکه این ابزارها، مخصوص ایدئولوژی های خاصی هستند و ما سادهانگارانه میخواهیم از این ابزارها، هرررطور استفادهای رو که مفید میدونیم، بکنیم.
مثلاً پستمن معتقده: اتفاقاً تلویزیون برای دیدن سرگرمیهاست، و دقیقاً همونجایی بزرگترین ضربهها رو به فرهنگ ملتها میزنه که میخواهیم برنامههای جدی، مثل اخبار، آموزش، ادبیات و... رو در تلویزیون دنبال کنیم. و میگه امکان نداره از تلویزیون ـ که ذاتاً با سرگرمی عجینه ـ یک کار جدی مثل آموزش که ـ ذاتاً با سختی همراهه ـ رو انتظار داشت. و در این روال، نه تنها آموزش اتفاق نمیوفته، بلکه فرهنگ مردم رو به اضمحلال میره..
#نمیدونم_شاید_راست_بگه -
It's still going to be one more nuanced review about the book that talked about the perils of show business and utilizing televised knowledge back in 1985 but still relevant to this very day.
The book, which is brief has around 165 pages, mainly consists of two sections. The first section reflects upon the ways by which people got informed since the remembered timeline starting from Socrates' trial and stopping before the advent of Television which became prominent around the mid-late 20th century. Things such as the use of language and correlating it with the ability to think and imagine, a brief histories of various forms of the sources of knowledge and concentrating a bit further upon background of typography, then telegraphic and telephonic sources as well.
The second section of the book deals much with analysis of then contemporary news and other tv shows. It also showered the role of television in changing the views of Religion, Education, Economy, (Image) Politics.
In my opinion, the first portion of the book is spellbinding comparing with the latter part. It doesn't mean to be boring but the familiarity of the subject from past personal learnings.
The ways in which the TV news networks hinders the ability of people to think broader as Postman records, "TV news has no intention of suggesting that any story has any implications, for that would require viewers to continue to think about it when it is done and therefore obstruct their attending to the next story that waits panting in the air."
The book often drew line between Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, and finding patterns and associations with the latter more often than the other.
"Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."
And I almost forgot mentioning David Foster Wallace for his works like Infinite Jest, E Unibus Pluram (Essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) were partially inspired by works of Postman and his contemporaries like Marshall McLuhan.
It's one of the very few books that's really needs to be read by everyone for the sake of original thinking. I can only wish I had read it sooner.
