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A review by thejames
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
5.0
Postman's words are prophetic. When he predicted a Huxlian society of people inundated with pleasure and distraction, he couldn't have envisioned a game where the world is constantly glued to screens and filled with streams of video and images. He explores how society went from oral tradition, to the written word, to print and then to television. We've gone so much farther in the past 35 years.
You read his words and Donald Trump being president makes sense. He's a constant machine of decontextualized nonsense which is exactly what works best on television. Just another blurb to be swept away until the commercial breaks hit and tell you how your life sucks if you don't drink a named Coke this summer with your hot friends.
He makes a strong distinction between junk TV and more serious TV. He says no one is really threatened by junk TV because they know it's junk, but serious news has created a discourse about the world and fed us so much useless, in-actionable information that we're left with all sorts of trivial understandings of the world.
Postman hits on this idea I've had floating in my head for a few years now which is that I think being well-informed is a fool's errand. This is not to say one should live in ignorance, but Postman points out that the average newscast is filled with all kinds of information over which we can not possibly exert any control or provide any influence. To be up on the news is to be fed all kinds of sensationalized, shocking stories delivered by the most deadpan delivery. In making society more global, we find ourselves knowing far more about what is going on halfway around the world while the person next door is a complete enigma to us.
There is no context, no understanding of say how the latest development in Iran is a result of the past 100+ years of history. It's just another news bite in which talking heads who are the least informed people babble on about subjects they have no knowledge about and leave the viewer with the idea that they've gained some valuable talking point but in actuality have only geared up to make a fool of him/herself to anyone who actually has studied the subject. And by the end of any given newscast there will be 20 or so subjects given roughly the same amount of time, completely without context or structure and leaving the audience with a sense they should return to see how all this develops without understanding how any of it began in the first place.
I could go on about how Postman's critique of our shift to a television based society has left us worse off than we were before. The book is a short read, but to anyone who has lived with a TV, Postman will hit on so many deep truths that are taken for granted in a society so invaded by television that most people will probably have not even begun to question television like Postman does here.
If you read ten books in a lifetime, this should probably be one of them.
You read his words and Donald Trump being president makes sense. He's a constant machine of decontextualized nonsense which is exactly what works best on television. Just another blurb to be swept away until the commercial breaks hit and tell you how your life sucks if you don't drink a named Coke this summer with your hot friends.
He makes a strong distinction between junk TV and more serious TV. He says no one is really threatened by junk TV because they know it's junk, but serious news has created a discourse about the world and fed us so much useless, in-actionable information that we're left with all sorts of trivial understandings of the world.
Postman hits on this idea I've had floating in my head for a few years now which is that I think being well-informed is a fool's errand. This is not to say one should live in ignorance, but Postman points out that the average newscast is filled with all kinds of information over which we can not possibly exert any control or provide any influence. To be up on the news is to be fed all kinds of sensationalized, shocking stories delivered by the most deadpan delivery. In making society more global, we find ourselves knowing far more about what is going on halfway around the world while the person next door is a complete enigma to us.
There is no context, no understanding of say how the latest development in Iran is a result of the past 100+ years of history. It's just another news bite in which talking heads who are the least informed people babble on about subjects they have no knowledge about and leave the viewer with the idea that they've gained some valuable talking point but in actuality have only geared up to make a fool of him/herself to anyone who actually has studied the subject. And by the end of any given newscast there will be 20 or so subjects given roughly the same amount of time, completely without context or structure and leaving the audience with a sense they should return to see how all this develops without understanding how any of it began in the first place.
I could go on about how Postman's critique of our shift to a television based society has left us worse off than we were before. The book is a short read, but to anyone who has lived with a TV, Postman will hit on so many deep truths that are taken for granted in a society so invaded by television that most people will probably have not even begun to question television like Postman does here.
If you read ten books in a lifetime, this should probably be one of them.