Amusing Ourselves to
Death was a book by the late Neil Postman originally published in 1985 and
republished twenty years later. The
essential argument of this book is that modern media, especially television,
only catch and hold our attention when the information is provided in an entertaining manner.
Summary from Amazon.com
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Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking
polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public
discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the
twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic
media—from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs—it has taken on even greater
significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what
happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject
to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining
controlof our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.
Review from a Reader
5 Stars
A Much Needed Exploration into the Philosophy of Media
By Ben Barczi on
August 21, 2002
Occasionally
one stumbles across a work which perfectly summarizes an era. For example, we
hail the muckracker novels, primarily "The Jungle," as a brilliant
picture of the late 19th century in America America
Postman's thesis in this brief but articulate book consists of two tenets: (1)
The form of communication, to some extent, determines (or is biased toward
certain types of) content; (2) Television, as our modern-day uber-form of
communication, has biases which are destructive toward the rational mind. TV
teaches us to expect life to be entertaining, rather than interesting; it
teaches us to expect 8-minute durations of anything and everything (anything
else is beyond our attention span); it teach us to be suspicious of argument
and discussion, and instead to accept facts at face value.
Furthermore - and, by far, the most important discovery Postman makes in this
book - TV teaches us to live a decontextualized life. Just as a TV program has
nothing to do with anything before or after it, nor the commercials inside it,
we learn to view life as a series of unconnected, random events which are
entertaining at best, and bear no significance toward any larger picture.
As a culture, America
Even today's elite students, who are certainly able to integrate lessons and
perform well academically, have fallen to this malady; as David Brooks pointed
out in his searinglly accurate article, "The Organization Kid,"
(Atlantic Monthly, April 2001) top-notch students no longer attempt to build
any sort of moral or philosophical structure from their studies; a life lived
in a context, makes no sense to the student who has grown up watching the
decontextualized television screen.
It is extremely important that today's Americans take a close look at just what
effects the television has had on themselves and their children; Postman's work
is dead on target. We have moved, as a nation, from those who seek
entertainment as a means to an end (most particularly, rest between productive
work), to those who seek entertainment as an end in itself. And, as Huxley
realized in Brave New World, this is the undoing of Western civilization - a
prosaic fade away into an entertained oblivion. Or, as T.S. Eliot put it in
"The Hollow Men," "This is the way the world ends/ not with a
bang but a whimper."
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