Library:Amusing Ourselves to Death
| Amusing Ourselves to Death | |
|---|---|
| Author | Neil Postman |
| First published | 1985 |
| ISBN | 978-0-14-303653-1 |
| Role | Analysis |
| Domains | Technology & Media Politics & Elections |
| Tactics | Propaganda Technique |
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a 1985 book by Neil Postman.
Summary
Neil Postman, a media theorist at New York University, published this book in 1985. It argues that television had transformed public discourse in America into a form of entertainment, degrading the culture's capacity for serious thought. Written before the internet, it is now widely read as a description of what came after.
Orwell or Huxley
The book opens by contrasting two visions of the future. George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, feared a society controlled by pain: banned books, concealed truth and imposed censorship. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, feared a society controlled by pleasure, in which no one would need to ban books because no one would want to read them, and truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Postman argues that Huxley, not Orwell, was the better prophet.
The medium is the metaphor
Building on Marshall McLuhan, Postman argues that every medium shapes what can be said through it. Print culture, he contends, favoured sustained, logical, sequential argument. He contrasts the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858, in which audiences followed hours of complex argument, with television, which favours images, emotion and fragments.
Information without context
Postman traces the roots of the problem to the telegraph and photography, which made it possible to transmit information stripped of context and with no bearing on the lives of those who received it. He introduces the "information-action ratio": people now receive vast amounts of information they can do nothing about. Television perfected this disconnection, joining unrelated items with the phrase "Now… this," which signals that nothing just seen has any connection to what comes next.
Everything becomes show business
The second half shows how news, religion, politics and education were reshaped by television's demand to entertain. The problem, Postman insists, is not that television offers entertainment but that it presents everything, including serious subjects, as entertainment. Even educational programmes, he argues, taught children to love television rather than learning.
Relevance to Bullshitopedia
Postman explains how a culture can lose its grip on truth without any censorship at all, through distraction, fragmentation and the conversion of serious matters into spectacle. That diagnosis applies with even greater force to social media, and it underlies the Technology & Media domain.