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orangefan65's review against another edition
4.0
Postman's now-famous thesis on the epistemology of television. That we have become a patently Huxleyan scenario instead of an Orwellian. It isn't - as he says - that all the things we've considered important (such as religion, education and politics) have been made into entertainment; it's that entertainment is now the only thing that's important. Here's a quote:
"America is. in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education. The first occurred in the fifth century b.c., when Athens underwent a change from an oral culture to an alphabet- writing culture. To understand what this meant, we must read Plato. The second occurred in the sixteenth century, when Europe underwent a radical transformation as a result of the printing press. To understand what this meant, we must read John Locke. The third is happening now, in America, as a result of the electronic revolution, particularly the invention of television. To understand what this means, we must read Marshall McLuhan." (Or Neil Postman, for that matter).
Unfortunately, modern evangelicalism has bought the lie that the gospel must be made "relevant" by being presented as entertainment and story-telling. The dumbing-down of American culture is fully upon us.
"America is. in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education. The first occurred in the fifth century b.c., when Athens underwent a change from an oral culture to an alphabet- writing culture. To understand what this meant, we must read Plato. The second occurred in the sixteenth century, when Europe underwent a radical transformation as a result of the printing press. To understand what this meant, we must read John Locke. The third is happening now, in America, as a result of the electronic revolution, particularly the invention of television. To understand what this means, we must read Marshall McLuhan." (Or Neil Postman, for that matter).
Unfortunately, modern evangelicalism has bought the lie that the gospel must be made "relevant" by being presented as entertainment and story-telling. The dumbing-down of American culture is fully upon us.
lookhome's review against another edition
4.0
This book is a little dated but does well to contextualize society's change from an oral, to a written to a visual means of communication.
Included key passages below:
What ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture. (6)
Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes its content. (7)
The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content. (7)
As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television. (8)
(In relation to McLuhan) I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation (9)
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image…. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture (9)
The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and givs us, not the familiar remember thing, but the glittering intensity of summoned-up hallucinations (13)
People like ourselves we see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people- a conversation with no one and yet everyone (13)
Languages are our medi. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture. (15)
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant (16)
Through resonance a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance (17)
In oral cultures proverbs and sayings are not occasional devices: They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them (19)
The oral tradition has lost much of its resonance but not all of it. Testimony is expected to be given orally, on the assumption that the spoken, not the written, word is a truer reflection of the state of mind of a witness (19)
In our culture, lawyers do not have to be wise, they need to be well briefed (20)
In the academic world, the published word is invested with greater prestige and authenticity than the spoken word (21)
The written word is, by its nature, addressed to the world, not an individual (21)
Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life (25)
In a purely oral culture, a high value is always placed on the power to memorize, for where there are no written words, the human mind must function as a mobile library (25)
Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations. (26)
A major new medium changes the structure of discourse, it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favouring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content (27)
They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity (28)
‘Thou shalt not write down they principles , still less print the, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time (32)
The printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local,... print made a greater impression than actual events. To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy (34)
It was diffuse. Its center was everywhere because it was nowhere. Every man was close to what (printed matter) talked about. Everyone could speak the same language. It was the product of a busy, mobile, public society (35)
Words have very little recommended them except as carriers of meaning. The shapes of written words are not especially interesting to look at (51)
To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense.It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, too detached (52)
In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such a discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or even worse, don’t care (52)
Advertising became one part depth psychology, one part aesthetic theory. Reason had to move itself into other arenas. (61)
Think of (famous people names)... and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely a face on a television screen (in Einstein’s case, a photography of a face). Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an imag-centered culture. (62)
Exposition is a moder of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourses were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially, a high valuation of reason and order, an abhorrence of contradiction, a large capacity for detachment and objectivity, and a tolerance for delayed response (64)
The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducting on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence (66)
The telegraph made information into a commodity (67)
(wireless information) … as the annihilation of space (68)
News from nowhere addressed to neon in particular began to criss-cross the nation (68)
In a sea of information, ther was very little of it to use (68)
Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to a meaningful action. (69
In any communciation environment, input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). (69)
Everything became everyone’s business( 70)
A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation by authors of the past (71)
To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not know about them (72)&&
What has God wrought (in relation to telegraph)- a disturbing answer cam back: a neighbourhood of strangers and pointless quantity, a world of fragments and discontinuities (72)
Photography is a language that speaks only in particularities. Its vocabulary of images is limited to the concrete representation. Unlike words and sentences, the photograph does not present to us an idea or concept about the world, except as we use language itself to convert the image to idea. (73)
Just as nature or the sea cannot be photographed, such larger abstraction as truth, honour, love, falsehood cannot be talked about in lexicon of pictures. For showing of and talking about are two very different kinds of processes…. The photograph presents the world as object language, the world as an idea (73)
The photograph documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible (74)
All understanding begins with out not accepting the world as it appears (74)
Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions (74)
Painting is al teast three times as old as writing, and the place of imagery in the repertoire of communication instruments was quite well understood in the nineteenth century (75)
The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news and, to a larger extent , of reality itself. (75)
For countless Americans, seeint, not reading, became the basis for believing (76)
A Pseudo context is a structure invented to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use (77)
The pseudo context is the last refuge, so to say, of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence and impotence (78)
Theirs was a duet of images and instancy, and together they played the tune of a new kind of public discourse in America (78)
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. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining (79)
We all building castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them (79)
We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher (79)
There is no audience so young that is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that is must forgo television (79)
Which means that all public understanding of these subjected is shaped by the biases of television (79)
Television has achieved the status of meta-medum- an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but out knowledge of ways of knowing as well (80)
He means by myth a way of understanding the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of, that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible (80)
For the loss of the sense of strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a mature to the extent to which we have been changed (81)
Television’s conversation promote incoherence and triviality (81)
Technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind (86)
A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates (86)
Each technology has an agenda of its own (87)
We must understand we are not talking about television as a technology but television as a medium (87)
Television… has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience (89)
The problem is not that televison presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue all together (89)
What does credibility imply in the case of a news show? What character is the co-anchor playing? And how do we decide that the performance lack verisimilitude (103)
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 wings. (105)
Americans are the best entertained na quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. (108)
&&& Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? (110)
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies (110)
What has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference (113)
Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human acitivity is stripped away, there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence (119)
There is no way to consecrate the space in which a television show i experienced (121)
You get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want (123)
By endowing things with magic, enchantement is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves for it (124)
Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not abstraction into our heads (125)
CApitalism is based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual sel-finterest (130)
By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions (131)
What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer (131)
Just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work, image politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason. (139)
The past is a world, Thomas Carlyle said, and not a void of grey haze (139)
Whereas in a classroom, one may ask a teacher questions, one can ask nothing of a television screen. Whereas school is centred on the development of language, television demands attention to images. Whereas attending school is a legal requirement, watching telelvision is an act of choice. Whereas in school, one fails to attend to the teachre at the risk of punishment, no penalties exist for failing to attend to the television screen. to behave oneself in school means to observe rules of public decorum, television watching requires no such observances, has no concept of public decorum . (147)
Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learn only what he is studying at the time. Collateral leaning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history…. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future (148)
We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organized around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed of light electronic image. (149)
I think it accurate to call television a curriculum. As I understand the word, a curriculum is a specifically constructed information system whose purpose is to influence, teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth. Television, of course, does exactly that, and does it relentlessly. In so doing, it competes successfully with the school curriculum. By which I mean, it damn near obliterates it (150)
Reason is best cultivated when it is rooted in robust emotional ground. You will even find some who say that learning is best facilitated by a loving and benign teacher. But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment. (150)
Tv commandments
Though shalt have no prerequisites
Thou shalt induct no perplexity
Thou salt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt
Television teaching always takes the form of story-telling, conducted through dynamic images and supported by music (152)
Included key passages below:
What ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture. (6)
Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes its content. (7)
The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content. (7)
As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television. (8)
(In relation to McLuhan) I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation (9)
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image…. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture (9)
The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and givs us, not the familiar remember thing, but the glittering intensity of summoned-up hallucinations (13)
People like ourselves we see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people- a conversation with no one and yet everyone (13)
Languages are our medi. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture. (15)
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant (16)
Through resonance a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance (17)
In oral cultures proverbs and sayings are not occasional devices: They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them (19)
The oral tradition has lost much of its resonance but not all of it. Testimony is expected to be given orally, on the assumption that the spoken, not the written, word is a truer reflection of the state of mind of a witness (19)
In our culture, lawyers do not have to be wise, they need to be well briefed (20)
In the academic world, the published word is invested with greater prestige and authenticity than the spoken word (21)
The written word is, by its nature, addressed to the world, not an individual (21)
Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life (25)
In a purely oral culture, a high value is always placed on the power to memorize, for where there are no written words, the human mind must function as a mobile library (25)
Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations. (26)
A major new medium changes the structure of discourse, it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favouring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content (27)
They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity (28)
‘Thou shalt not write down they principles , still less print the, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time (32)
The printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local,... print made a greater impression than actual events. To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy (34)
It was diffuse. Its center was everywhere because it was nowhere. Every man was close to what (printed matter) talked about. Everyone could speak the same language. It was the product of a busy, mobile, public society (35)
Words have very little recommended them except as carriers of meaning. The shapes of written words are not especially interesting to look at (51)
To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense.It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, too detached (52)
In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such a discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or even worse, don’t care (52)
Advertising became one part depth psychology, one part aesthetic theory. Reason had to move itself into other arenas. (61)
Think of (famous people names)... and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely a face on a television screen (in Einstein’s case, a photography of a face). Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an imag-centered culture. (62)
Exposition is a moder of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourses were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially, a high valuation of reason and order, an abhorrence of contradiction, a large capacity for detachment and objectivity, and a tolerance for delayed response (64)
The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducting on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence (66)
The telegraph made information into a commodity (67)
(wireless information) … as the annihilation of space (68)
News from nowhere addressed to neon in particular began to criss-cross the nation (68)
In a sea of information, ther was very little of it to use (68)
Most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to a meaningful action. (69
In any communciation environment, input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). (69)
Everything became everyone’s business( 70)
A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation by authors of the past (71)
To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not know about them (72)&&
What has God wrought (in relation to telegraph)- a disturbing answer cam back: a neighbourhood of strangers and pointless quantity, a world of fragments and discontinuities (72)
Photography is a language that speaks only in particularities. Its vocabulary of images is limited to the concrete representation. Unlike words and sentences, the photograph does not present to us an idea or concept about the world, except as we use language itself to convert the image to idea. (73)
Just as nature or the sea cannot be photographed, such larger abstraction as truth, honour, love, falsehood cannot be talked about in lexicon of pictures. For showing of and talking about are two very different kinds of processes…. The photograph presents the world as object language, the world as an idea (73)
The photograph documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible (74)
All understanding begins with out not accepting the world as it appears (74)
Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions (74)
Painting is al teast three times as old as writing, and the place of imagery in the repertoire of communication instruments was quite well understood in the nineteenth century (75)
The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news and, to a larger extent , of reality itself. (75)
For countless Americans, seeint, not reading, became the basis for believing (76)
A Pseudo context is a structure invented to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use (77)
The pseudo context is the last refuge, so to say, of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence and impotence (78)
Theirs was a duet of images and instancy, and together they played the tune of a new kind of public discourse in America (78)
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. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining (79)
We all building castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them (79)
We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher (79)
There is no audience so young that is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that is must forgo television (79)
Which means that all public understanding of these subjected is shaped by the biases of television (79)
Television has achieved the status of meta-medum- an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but out knowledge of ways of knowing as well (80)
He means by myth a way of understanding the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of, that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible (80)
For the loss of the sense of strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a mature to the extent to which we have been changed (81)
Television’s conversation promote incoherence and triviality (81)
Technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind (86)
A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates (86)
Each technology has an agenda of its own (87)
We must understand we are not talking about television as a technology but television as a medium (87)
Television… has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience (89)
The problem is not that televison presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue all together (89)
What does credibility imply in the case of a news show? What character is the co-anchor playing? And how do we decide that the performance lack verisimilitude (103)
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 wings. (105)
Americans are the best entertained na quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. (108)
&&& Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? (110)
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies (110)
What has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference (113)
Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human acitivity is stripped away, there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence (119)
There is no way to consecrate the space in which a television show i experienced (121)
You get your share of the audience only by offering people something they want (123)
By endowing things with magic, enchantement is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves for it (124)
Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not abstraction into our heads (125)
CApitalism is based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual sel-finterest (130)
By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions (131)
What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer (131)
Just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work, image politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason. (139)
The past is a world, Thomas Carlyle said, and not a void of grey haze (139)
Whereas in a classroom, one may ask a teacher questions, one can ask nothing of a television screen. Whereas school is centred on the development of language, television demands attention to images. Whereas attending school is a legal requirement, watching telelvision is an act of choice. Whereas in school, one fails to attend to the teachre at the risk of punishment, no penalties exist for failing to attend to the television screen. to behave oneself in school means to observe rules of public decorum, television watching requires no such observances, has no concept of public decorum . (147)
Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learn only what he is studying at the time. Collateral leaning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history…. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future (148)
We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organized around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed of light electronic image. (149)
I think it accurate to call television a curriculum. As I understand the word, a curriculum is a specifically constructed information system whose purpose is to influence, teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth. Television, of course, does exactly that, and does it relentlessly. In so doing, it competes successfully with the school curriculum. By which I mean, it damn near obliterates it (150)
Reason is best cultivated when it is rooted in robust emotional ground. You will even find some who say that learning is best facilitated by a loving and benign teacher. But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment. (150)
Tv commandments
Though shalt have no prerequisites
Thou shalt induct no perplexity
Thou salt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt
Television teaching always takes the form of story-telling, conducted through dynamic images and supported by music (152)
klib's review against another edition
4.0
I appreciated the perspective of the author, even dated as it is. I found that a lot of his ideas of how television has changed modern discourse has carried over to the Internet age, and we're no better for being able to talk back. It was certainly a good perspective builder. I'm looking forward to reading some authors that have followed up on his ideas.
proffy's review against another edition
3.0
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits that the world of entertainment is the predecessor, or possibly the culmination, of Aldous Huxley's vision in Brave New World. Huxley's novel presents a world in which people are so concerned with being happy they are willing to give up freedom. Conditioned from actual conception biologically and then further conditioned through sleep-teaching, people live lives which have been entirely mapped out for them: each class following the prescribed and hypnopaedically conditioned beliefs and activities given to them such as promiscuity ("everyone belongs to everyone else"), a fear of solitude, a perfect understanding of their job but nothing else, and a drug called soma to dispel any unhappy thoughts.
To Postman, I suppose both the drug and the conditioning translates as television or in a larger context, the media. And I can very much see this in modern society. I often teach that our ideological beliefs are taught to us through tv. What we think of as acceptable behavior and goals are dictated by the stars both off and on screen...conditioning. Television of course is also what we do to kill time, make us happy, and help us escape from our everyday lives....soma.
Postman's philosophy is wonderfully accessible in this book, and throughout, I was entertained even as I was inspired to think.
[b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165517734s/5129.jpg|3204877][a:Aldous Huxley|3487|Aldous Huxley|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1222974446p2/3487.jpg]
To Postman, I suppose both the drug and the conditioning translates as television or in a larger context, the media. And I can very much see this in modern society. I often teach that our ideological beliefs are taught to us through tv. What we think of as acceptable behavior and goals are dictated by the stars both off and on screen...conditioning. Television of course is also what we do to kill time, make us happy, and help us escape from our everyday lives....soma.
Postman's philosophy is wonderfully accessible in this book, and throughout, I was entertained even as I was inspired to think.
[b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165517734s/5129.jpg|3204877][a:Aldous Huxley|3487|Aldous Huxley|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1222974446p2/3487.jpg]
proffy's review against another edition
5.0
I've read this three times, and each time I am nodding in agreement. I would love to read whatever is the current version of this work from the 1980s.
hyun15's review against another edition
dark
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
it's because you kids are watching that damn television all the time
michaelwenig's review against another edition
3.0
This book was bonkers. It was a very interesting read (originally written in 1985) and gave kind of an eerie diagnosis of the effects of television on American culture up to that point. It was eerie because the author, as best I can tell made a good argument about television dominating the content of what we talk about as a culture and how it created a framework for how we think, but then called the computer a “vastly overrated technology.” I think Neil Postman would probably crap his pants if he could see social media in 2022.
All in all, this book gave me some really interesting points to think about, chiefly about the ways I consume technology and social media and how it influences the way I am formed and how I interact with the world around me.
All in all, this book gave me some really interesting points to think about, chiefly about the ways I consume technology and social media and how it influences the way I am formed and how I interact with the world around me.
missprint_'s review against another edition
2.0
There are two dystopic novels in the canon as it relates to my experience in a New York City high school: 1984 (1949) by George Orwell (the original home of Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth) and Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley (a frivolous world controlled by fancy toys and a drug called Soma).
"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."
The quote above comes from the forward of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) and is one of my favorite ways to explain two of the scariest novels I have ever read. It is also a quote I read either in high school or college, suggesting that Postman's reach is farther than I would have thought before graduate school when I realized I had seen his writing (at some point) before.
What, exactly, is Postman so worried about? Television. Postman's core argument is that, like the printing press before, the television has fundamentally and irrevocably changed the way society lives, interacts, and even thinks. Postman's fear, as his mention of Huxley suggests, is that these changes will create a frivolous, complacent society that will not need to be oppressed with Orwellian devices because they do not know they are being oppressed in the first place.
As was the case with Technopoly, Postman makes a lot of interesting points here (in a lot of ways, it felt like reading the same book twice just replacing the word "technology" for "television" depending on which one you are looking at) but very few points that I could wholeheartedly embrace. Twenty-plus years after its original publication, Amusing Ourselves to Death is being touted as more relevant than ever before. And yet I can't help but think, if the book is so relevant and so accurate, shouldn't society as we know it have collapsed by now?
For example, Postman dedicates a whole chapter to how politics and indeed our very understanding of politics has changed now that television is used to broadcast political commericials and debates. Could a man like Taft (weighing in at around 300 pounds) be elected in this day and age? Postman thinks not. And perhaps that is fair. But having seen the outrage over the 2000 (and 2004) election results, and the huge turnout just recently to elect Obama--I can't take Postman's pessimisstic view. Society is changing, yes. Television was part of that change, yes. But neither of those things mean we are going to start taking Soma and spouting aphorisms like "Ending is better than mending."
Many parts of this book are interesting. Broken into two parts, the first offers a thorough examination of life in the age of the printing press that appeals to my inner history buff. Postman's lamentation on the advent of tel-evangelism was also fascinating though more sociologically and psychologically than as the Huxleyan caution Postman is trying to put together.
Maybe it's already too late for me. Maybe I have already bought into Postman's Age of Show Business and am now beyond hope. But I don't think so--the key word there being think. As Postman notes:
"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."
Again, perhaps I'm being optimistic, but I believe people are thinking now more than ever--partly because of the technologies that Postman is so wary of. With the Internet and blogging and even Twitter, there is so much more interconnectivity and awareness now than there was before that, once again, I think Postman might have it wrong. Huxley might prove right in the end but for now my fears lie with Orwell because, for my part, I still know exactly what I'm laughing about and I'm positive I'm still thinking.
"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."
The quote above comes from the forward of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) and is one of my favorite ways to explain two of the scariest novels I have ever read. It is also a quote I read either in high school or college, suggesting that Postman's reach is farther than I would have thought before graduate school when I realized I had seen his writing (at some point) before.
What, exactly, is Postman so worried about? Television. Postman's core argument is that, like the printing press before, the television has fundamentally and irrevocably changed the way society lives, interacts, and even thinks. Postman's fear, as his mention of Huxley suggests, is that these changes will create a frivolous, complacent society that will not need to be oppressed with Orwellian devices because they do not know they are being oppressed in the first place.
As was the case with Technopoly, Postman makes a lot of interesting points here (in a lot of ways, it felt like reading the same book twice just replacing the word "technology" for "television" depending on which one you are looking at) but very few points that I could wholeheartedly embrace. Twenty-plus years after its original publication, Amusing Ourselves to Death is being touted as more relevant than ever before. And yet I can't help but think, if the book is so relevant and so accurate, shouldn't society as we know it have collapsed by now?
For example, Postman dedicates a whole chapter to how politics and indeed our very understanding of politics has changed now that television is used to broadcast political commericials and debates. Could a man like Taft (weighing in at around 300 pounds) be elected in this day and age? Postman thinks not. And perhaps that is fair. But having seen the outrage over the 2000 (and 2004) election results, and the huge turnout just recently to elect Obama--I can't take Postman's pessimisstic view. Society is changing, yes. Television was part of that change, yes. But neither of those things mean we are going to start taking Soma and spouting aphorisms like "Ending is better than mending."
Many parts of this book are interesting. Broken into two parts, the first offers a thorough examination of life in the age of the printing press that appeals to my inner history buff. Postman's lamentation on the advent of tel-evangelism was also fascinating though more sociologically and psychologically than as the Huxleyan caution Postman is trying to put together.
Maybe it's already too late for me. Maybe I have already bought into Postman's Age of Show Business and am now beyond hope. But I don't think so--the key word there being think. As Postman notes:
"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."
Again, perhaps I'm being optimistic, but I believe people are thinking now more than ever--partly because of the technologies that Postman is so wary of. With the Internet and blogging and even Twitter, there is so much more interconnectivity and awareness now than there was before that, once again, I think Postman might have it wrong. Huxley might prove right in the end but for now my fears lie with Orwell because, for my part, I still know exactly what I'm laughing about and I'm positive I'm still thinking.