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bigtex's review against another edition
5.0
First read this book about 25 years ago. While dated it is still frighteningly accurate.
kenhunt's review against another edition
informative
4.0
Though it is tied to its time, particularly in worries specifically about television news and televangelists, there is plenty here that is searingly relevant today.
spenkevich's review against another edition
3.0
*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 [b:Infinite Jest|6759|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1446876799l/6759._SY75_.jpg|3271542] 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 [b:Infinite Jest|544063|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415152661l/544063._SY75_.jpg|3271542], 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.
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 [b:Democracy in America|16619|Democracy in America|Alexis de Tocqueville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388206188l/16619._SY75_.jpg|90454], 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 [b:Common Sense|161744|Common Sense|Thomas Paine|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309209451l/161744._SY75_.jpg|2548496] 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 [b:The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference|2612|The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference|Malcolm Gladwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1473396980l/2612._SY75_.jpg|2124255]), 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’.
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 [b:Brave New World|6715623|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348718213l/6715623._SX50_.jpg|3204877] 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
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 [b:Infinite Jest|6759|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1446876799l/6759._SY75_.jpg|3271542] 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 [b:Infinite Jest|544063|Infinite Jest|David Foster Wallace|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415152661l/544063._SY75_.jpg|3271542], 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 [b:Democracy in America|16619|Democracy in America|Alexis de Tocqueville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388206188l/16619._SY75_.jpg|90454], 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 [b:Common Sense|161744|Common Sense|Thomas Paine|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1309209451l/161744._SY75_.jpg|2548496] 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 [b:The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference|2612|The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference|Malcolm Gladwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1473396980l/2612._SY75_.jpg|2124255]), 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 [b:On Photography|52372|On Photography|Susan Sontag|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1671548651l/52372._SY75_.jpg|768174], 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 [b:Brave New World|6715623|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348718213l/6715623._SX50_.jpg|3204877] 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
acsaper's review against another edition
5.0
This book is brilliant. The argument is well articulated, convincing, challenging, and certain worth great consideration.
As 1984, the year, not the book, comes and goes, Postman reflect on our advancing technological society. He finds that the most pressing concern is not the Orwellian conception of Big Brother taking over our lives. Rather, in reflection of Aldous Huxley, Postman sees American society as voluntarily acquiescing to its own self-imposed oppression. In short, that we have begun Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Postman explores how the advent of television drastically altered our epistomology, much as did the arrival of the written word. Avoiding a general scholarly critique of television, Postman explains how this new form of media has drastically altered the way that information is produced, presented, and consumed.
At the risk of losing the force behind Postman's brilliantly shaped argument, he suggests, in short, that the epistomology of television is one of entertainment. In turn, entertainment demands a sort of simplicity and communicability that necessarily eschews critical thought, reflection, and foundational learning, where forward thinking relies on a fundamental grasp of prerequisite concepts and ideas. Rather, television has reduced news, politics, and education to 'bites,' ready to be consumed by audiences that demand ever easier mastication.
The implications of this new epistomology reflect far and wide and television has become so popular, and so expansive, that it now shapes our expectation of discourse in all areas from news to politics, and education to religion. The effect of this stranglehold television has on shaping discourse, is, well, oppressive, but also self-wrought.
Three decades later, this piece is still incredibly timely. Elections, political discourse, wars, education, and religion are still shaped and delivered directly to our homes by television. One thing that Postman does not touch on is the internet, as this book precedes the phenomenon by a decade or so. While there are obviously some implications of yet a newer form of technology, much of what Postman offers is seen taken to great extreme online as individuals self-select themselves into snippets of ever more irrelevant information.
Sure, we are more stimulated than we ever have been and have more world knowledge that we could have ever dreamed. But, do you have any idea what your neighbors names are? Or when the last time you talked about a book with a friend was?
An excellent read that I'd love to talk about, whenever you get a chance to pick it up!
As 1984, the year, not the book, comes and goes, Postman reflect on our advancing technological society. He finds that the most pressing concern is not the Orwellian conception of Big Brother taking over our lives. Rather, in reflection of Aldous Huxley, Postman sees American society as voluntarily acquiescing to its own self-imposed oppression. In short, that we have begun Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Postman explores how the advent of television drastically altered our epistomology, much as did the arrival of the written word. Avoiding a general scholarly critique of television, Postman explains how this new form of media has drastically altered the way that information is produced, presented, and consumed.
At the risk of losing the force behind Postman's brilliantly shaped argument, he suggests, in short, that the epistomology of television is one of entertainment. In turn, entertainment demands a sort of simplicity and communicability that necessarily eschews critical thought, reflection, and foundational learning, where forward thinking relies on a fundamental grasp of prerequisite concepts and ideas. Rather, television has reduced news, politics, and education to 'bites,' ready to be consumed by audiences that demand ever easier mastication.
The implications of this new epistomology reflect far and wide and television has become so popular, and so expansive, that it now shapes our expectation of discourse in all areas from news to politics, and education to religion. The effect of this stranglehold television has on shaping discourse, is, well, oppressive, but also self-wrought.
Three decades later, this piece is still incredibly timely. Elections, political discourse, wars, education, and religion are still shaped and delivered directly to our homes by television. One thing that Postman does not touch on is the internet, as this book precedes the phenomenon by a decade or so. While there are obviously some implications of yet a newer form of technology, much of what Postman offers is seen taken to great extreme online as individuals self-select themselves into snippets of ever more irrelevant information.
Sure, we are more stimulated than we ever have been and have more world knowledge that we could have ever dreamed. But, do you have any idea what your neighbors names are? Or when the last time you talked about a book with a friend was?
An excellent read that I'd love to talk about, whenever you get a chance to pick it up!