Scan barcode
A review by jeneexo
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
3.0
So, I had to read this book for a cinema studies class I'm taking this summer. And I'm not sure if it's the large quantities of text I had to force myself through in only two sittings due to procrastination or an actual distaste for the book, but I found it to be rather hard to get through.
I thought it made really great points about our culture and the effect that this new technology has had on it, but parts of it were just torture for me, probably because the book was not entertaining because the entire point of the book was to inform me that our entire culture is going to hell because we all want to be entertained all the time.
I found the points about the history of cultural discourse and how technologies have affected it, and how we are molding our education into something television-friendly at education's loss to be very interesting and one of those light bulb 'I never thought about it that way' kinds of things, but at the same time I didn't find the vernacular very reader-friendly and thought much of the book was very long-winded despite some valuable pieces of wisdom scattered throughout.
While I feel enlightened, I'm not running to pick up anymore of Postman's books anytime soon, however enlightened they may be.
I thought it made really great points about our culture and the effect that this new technology has had on it, but parts of it were just torture for me, probably because the book was not entertaining because the entire point of the book was to inform me that our entire culture is going to hell because we all want to be entertained all the time.
I found the points about the history of cultural discourse and how technologies have affected it, and how we are molding our education into something television-friendly at education's loss to be very interesting and one of those light bulb 'I never thought about it that way' kinds of things, but at the same time I didn't find the vernacular very reader-friendly and thought much of the book was very long-winded despite some valuable pieces of wisdom scattered throughout.
While I feel enlightened, I'm not running to pick up anymore of Postman's books anytime soon, however enlightened they may be.