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A review by proffy
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
3.0
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits that the world of entertainment is the predecessor, or possibly the culmination, of Aldous Huxley's vision in Brave New World. Huxley's novel presents a world in which people are so concerned with being happy they are willing to give up freedom. Conditioned from actual conception biologically and then further conditioned through sleep-teaching, people live lives which have been entirely mapped out for them: each class following the prescribed and hypnopaedically conditioned beliefs and activities given to them such as promiscuity ("everyone belongs to everyone else"), a fear of solitude, a perfect understanding of their job but nothing else, and a drug called soma to dispel any unhappy thoughts.
To Postman, I suppose both the drug and the conditioning translates as television or in a larger context, the media. And I can very much see this in modern society. I often teach that our ideological beliefs are taught to us through tv. What we think of as acceptable behavior and goals are dictated by the stars both off and on screen...conditioning. Television of course is also what we do to kill time, make us happy, and help us escape from our everyday lives....soma.
Postman's philosophy is wonderfully accessible in this book, and throughout, I was entertained even as I was inspired to think.
[b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165517734s/5129.jpg|3204877][a:Aldous Huxley|3487|Aldous Huxley|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1222974446p2/3487.jpg]
To Postman, I suppose both the drug and the conditioning translates as television or in a larger context, the media. And I can very much see this in modern society. I often teach that our ideological beliefs are taught to us through tv. What we think of as acceptable behavior and goals are dictated by the stars both off and on screen...conditioning. Television of course is also what we do to kill time, make us happy, and help us escape from our everyday lives....soma.
Postman's philosophy is wonderfully accessible in this book, and throughout, I was entertained even as I was inspired to think.
[b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165517734s/5129.jpg|3204877][a:Aldous Huxley|3487|Aldous Huxley|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1222974446p2/3487.jpg]