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A review by ben_smitty
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
5.0
Whenever someone asks me how I learned to speak English, I tell them that in addition to attending a bilingual school early on, I watched a lot of TV. Codename: Kids Next Door and Samurai Jack were the close friends that I grew up with, and I have fond memories of ripping open a fresh, family-sized bag of chips in front of my TV as I awaited the new episode each Friday night. TV was, essentially, how I came to understand the intricacies of American culture and even myself before my twenty-seven hour flight brought me to the land of the free.
Well, America soon introduced me to reading. My host family handed me a copy of Pilgrim's Progress and Augustine's Confessions and told me that I had to shut all forms of technology and be upstairs by 10pm. I was a pissy little boy without my TV, but I found through the world of reading a deeper, intellectual, never-ending labyrinth that I could spend my entire life exploring, lost with wonder.
The two parts of my life were so far apart from one another that I never even compared the two, and it's strange to me that someone would say that the only difference between these two is the "medium." I soon realized that people who say this have never spent a lot of time reading. Postman confirmed and clarified many things about the limits of television; how television is an impossible medium for deep thought, how everything television portrays is entertainment. He builds on McLuhan's concept that "The medium is the message" by explaining how television has changed the way we look at the world since entertainment value is now equated with importance. Nightmarish as this dystopia is, Postman desperately clings to the hope of education as the only solution we have to fight against the effects of a scattered, entertainment-driven world.
Well, America soon introduced me to reading. My host family handed me a copy of Pilgrim's Progress and Augustine's Confessions and told me that I had to shut all forms of technology and be upstairs by 10pm. I was a pissy little boy without my TV, but I found through the world of reading a deeper, intellectual, never-ending labyrinth that I could spend my entire life exploring, lost with wonder.
The two parts of my life were so far apart from one another that I never even compared the two, and it's strange to me that someone would say that the only difference between these two is the "medium." I soon realized that people who say this have never spent a lot of time reading. Postman confirmed and clarified many things about the limits of television; how television is an impossible medium for deep thought, how everything television portrays is entertainment. He builds on McLuhan's concept that "The medium is the message" by explaining how television has changed the way we look at the world since entertainment value is now equated with importance. Nightmarish as this dystopia is, Postman desperately clings to the hope of education as the only solution we have to fight against the effects of a scattered, entertainment-driven world.