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peebee's review against another edition
4.0
Book number 2 on the what the fuck is Byrne going on and on about reading list. It's getting a little spooky that every complaint I have about this country since I got back has a twenty year old book dedicated to it. And that it was apparently paid as much attention as I'm getting. We're all fucked. In a big way.
As for the book itself the style has a crotchety "Well I never" air about it, mostly when the author tries to be funny. Otherwise, great.
As for the book itself the style has a crotchety "Well I never" air about it, mostly when the author tries to be funny. Otherwise, great.
notaturnip's review against another edition
5.0
This book was written in 1985 and while it constitutes a very thorough assessment about the changes television was making in America, there are still some lessons to be found over thirty years later. Neil Postman explores how television as a medium perverted our primary means of communication, and subsequently impacted non-television media as well. I would love to see his assessment about social media and how it feeds into the same thought processes that led him to caution all of us against the ills of television.
For anyone trying to pinpoint where the world started to get quite so weird, I think this book is a great start!
For anyone trying to pinpoint where the world started to get quite so weird, I think this book is a great start!
cassiakarin's review against another edition
4.0
Whenever I bring this book up to people who are "In the know" about anything, their first comment to me is, "Ah, a classic." I now can see why. For though this book was written in the 1980s, the foundational principles explained in its pages carry a weight of wisdom for all ages proceeding it. I was a tad distracted by the explicit references to current trends and affairs used in the book because of their datedness, but that did not deter my eagerness to hear out the still very relevant points. In fact, I marveled and chuckled at his own shock of the current mental capacities and societal declines compared to my own experience nearly forty years later. I longed to hear his opinion of today's society, and of social media rather than television news!
There were parts of the book that If found a bit difficult, a bit hardy in the best way, which was a needed challenge and a somewhat humbling as I put myself in the context of his criticisms regarding the growing lack of basic rationality and ability to reason through or articulate argumentation.
Overall, this was a needed book for my philosophical understanding of the world and helped me gain and better understanding of where our society and culture has come from, and more importantly, why it is where it is today.
There were parts of the book that If found a bit difficult, a bit hardy in the best way, which was a needed challenge and a somewhat humbling as I put myself in the context of his criticisms regarding the growing lack of basic rationality and ability to reason through or articulate argumentation.
Overall, this was a needed book for my philosophical understanding of the world and helped me gain and better understanding of where our society and culture has come from, and more importantly, why it is where it is today.
azureyoshi's review against another edition
4.0
It's impressive the points of this book still hold up as well as they do, even with the advent of the internet. This book is a good overview of the transition society made with the advent of the idiot box, as well as the unintended consequences of doing so.
adrian_h's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
There aren’t just a lot of parallels to our world right now, but it goes beyond that. Every issue mentioned is a lot worse now. Internet and social media particular exasperate every issue mentioned here.
The immediacy and glut of useless information lacking in depth, context and history. The constant attempts at packaging education and learning as entertainment. The assumption that the destination is some technical utopia that solves all our problems without the examination if the current direction of travel is indeed making things better or worse. The writer’s reflection on “Now this…”, newscasters quickly moving on from some terrible disaster to some other unconnected event seems benign compared to what doomscrolling through TikTok videos looks like now.
It’s an old book, but more relevant than ever. AI will again make these issues worse than TV, internet 1.0, and social media ever did.
The immediacy and glut of useless information lacking in depth, context and history. The constant attempts at packaging education and learning as entertainment. The assumption that the destination is some technical utopia that solves all our problems without the examination if the current direction of travel is indeed making things better or worse. The writer’s reflection on “Now this…”, newscasters quickly moving on from some terrible disaster to some other unconnected event seems benign compared to what doomscrolling through TikTok videos looks like now.
It’s an old book, but more relevant than ever. AI will again make these issues worse than TV, internet 1.0, and social media ever did.