A review by 18ck
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness by Neil Postman

4.0

Reading this was a strange sensation. On the surface, it's hugely outdated. He's writing in the mid-late eighties when television is still the most powerful medium and computers, while they exist are "overrated". He discusses Reagan's falsehoods and Television's inability to hold him to account due to a fundamental unseriousness. All this seems like a dim, forgotten age to us now, and yet he still has a lot to say about how the medium is (to borrow from another well-known book he refers to often) the message. The way we experience the content of TV shows distorts their meaning and the place they hold in our imaginations.
Apply this to 2020, when text and video are fused together in a way they never were in the twentieth century, but with very little ability to verify the "facts" that swim into our social media feeds every day. Wheel Trump onto the stage, and you can see the Reagan era played out a thousand times more glaringly. It's so jarringly current it makes your head spin, and he really does come up with some answers to why we're in this mess, and why we have lost the ability to think critically: because news is no longer something we think about, weigh up, take action on, it's just content, like cat videos and conspiray theories and jokes.