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A review by lookhome
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
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)