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A review by nrt43
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
5.0
This book I realize now after reading it again has been a significant influence in how I see the world, and it deserves fuller exploration. I book-marked many places. Here are my bookmarks from the first half of the book:
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"We are all... great abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible so as to accept it."
"The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation."
"The God of the Jews was to exist in the word and through the word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy, so that a new kind of god could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic conjunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominate influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations."
The best things on television are it's junk.... We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities, but by what it claims as significant.
The River Metaphor
"I find it useful to think of the situation in this way. Changes in the symbolic environment are like changes in the natural environment: they are both gradual and additive at first, and then all at once, a critical mass is achieved... a river that has slowly been polluted, suddenly becomes toxic. Most of the fish perish. Swimming becomes a danger to health. But even then the river may look the same and one may still take a boat ride on it. In other words, even when life has been taken from it, the river does not disappear, nor do all of its uses, but its value has been seriously diminished, and its degraded condition will have harmful effects through the landscape. It is this way with our symbolic environment. We have reached I believe a critical mass in that electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose information, ideas, and epistemology are given form by the television, not by the printed word....
In the analogy I have drawn above, the river refers largely to what we call 'public discourse,' our political, religious, informational, and commercial forms of conversation. I am arguing that a television based epistemology pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape, not that it pollutes everything...." This resonates as truth for me. Today, the more people "swim" in the river of media and in particular politics, often the less healthy they mentally become.
"The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography's definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevence, impotence, and incoherence."
At the end of chapter five Postman lays out a summary of the rest of the book:
"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing, that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality, that the phrase 'serious television' is a contradiction in terms and that television speaks in only one persistent voice, the voice of entertainment. Beyond that I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one great American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television in other words is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show-business. It is entirely possible of course that in the end we shall find that delightful and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, 50 years ago."
This book was written in 1985. His prophetic message has been fulfilled in 2020. Not sure what that means for the future...
---
"We are all... great abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible so as to accept it."
"The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation."
"The God of the Jews was to exist in the word and through the word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy, so that a new kind of god could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic conjunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominate influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations."
The best things on television are it's junk.... We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities, but by what it claims as significant.
The River Metaphor
"I find it useful to think of the situation in this way. Changes in the symbolic environment are like changes in the natural environment: they are both gradual and additive at first, and then all at once, a critical mass is achieved... a river that has slowly been polluted, suddenly becomes toxic. Most of the fish perish. Swimming becomes a danger to health. But even then the river may look the same and one may still take a boat ride on it. In other words, even when life has been taken from it, the river does not disappear, nor do all of its uses, but its value has been seriously diminished, and its degraded condition will have harmful effects through the landscape. It is this way with our symbolic environment. We have reached I believe a critical mass in that electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose information, ideas, and epistemology are given form by the television, not by the printed word....
In the analogy I have drawn above, the river refers largely to what we call 'public discourse,' our political, religious, informational, and commercial forms of conversation. I am arguing that a television based epistemology pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape, not that it pollutes everything...." This resonates as truth for me. Today, the more people "swim" in the river of media and in particular politics, often the less healthy they mentally become.
"The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography's definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevence, impotence, and incoherence."
At the end of chapter five Postman lays out a summary of the rest of the book:
"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing, that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality, that the phrase 'serious television' is a contradiction in terms and that television speaks in only one persistent voice, the voice of entertainment. Beyond that I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one great American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television in other words is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show-business. It is entirely possible of course that in the end we shall find that delightful and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, 50 years ago."
This book was written in 1985. His prophetic message has been fulfilled in 2020. Not sure what that means for the future...