Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

"Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials." -Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In the Age of Showbusiness by Neil Postman is a book outside my usual reading patterns, but, I am glad to say I enjoyed this book, and can even call it an eye-opener, a paradigm shifter, and even among the most compelling arguments I've ever read to think carefully and cautiously about the direction our culture is headed. If you are a Cinema Media Arts major, a Business Marketing major, a Theater Arts major, a History major, or just a person that wants to think about how media affects us, this book is a mandatory read. Neil Postman argues that the things we love: technology, television, radio, computers, and the internet, all things we are entertained by, have and will turn our society into a vacuum of "absurdity" and "irrelevance" if they go unchecked. "Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." If you don't agree, consider these basic questions: When was the last time you had a "deep" conversation? How often do you discuss "ideas" as opposed to "trivialities" with your friends? Does "public discourse" (conversations) seem more emotion-based or logic-based? Why in the world is this happening, because, historically speaking, this is not normal. "The Medium Is The Message" If you've ever listened to Pink Floyd's Amused To Death, or better yet, Switchfoot's Selling The News, both of those songs are based off of this book, showing the importance of this book, at least to modern alternative and rock music bands. Both these songs mention the phrase: "The medium is the message". In other words, the medium (tool) that our culture uses to communicate (Newspapers or TV) with ourselves and with each other will determine the content and quality of the message (of what is being communicated). In short, the form of communication determines the content and quality of what is being communicated. There are largely three cultural mediums that cultures have used to communicate, 1.) speech-centered (think B.C. when the printing press wasn't around and all people could do was tell stories and communicate by word of mouth), 2.) print-centered (think books, print newspapers, pamphlets, etc.), and 3.) image-centered (think televisions, the internet, and magazines...) A Monumental Shift In our age, we are experiencing a monumental shift in "mediums" of communication, and as the phrase goes, the "message" is being changed as well. The "Age of Exposition" as Postman calls it, which was America from it's conception to the 1960′s, was marked by a national fervor to read books. The "Age of Show-business" as Postman calls it, is marked by a national fervor to watch images on a screen. Consider the act of reading, how it encourages "rationality" and how confronting a page of symbols requires a person to "understand". It demands solemn response rather than impulsive reaction. This is so, mainly because, "to engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and over-generalizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another..." Reading forms your mind like a potter forms clay, into a logical, reasoning, discerning, deducing, powerful machine. In the America of the 1800′s people would listen to political speeches, such as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates which lasted for seven hours at time, just for fun, and it wasn't uncommon to find a crowd of people surrounding a person giving an intellectual oration on a dead tree stump. Lecture halls spanned the 50 states where throngs of people would line up and pay money, sometimes upwards of $200 to hear public intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, for hours, and they did that just like we watch movies at a theater today. Clearly our intention-span has diminished a great deal, and our focus has turned from intellectuality to entertainment, almost 180 degrees. The TV The introduction of the TV has affected the minds and hearts of our culture greatly. Consider the difference between watching TV and reading a book, how watching short snippets of presentations, where the hook comes around and around to entice our emotions, while reading demands sitting for long periods of time, where the author means everything he says and is appealing to our logic and reason. TV pulls us from the past to a perpetual present where it sells you each second you're watching by "appealing to your passions", reading pulls us from the present to the wide scope of history, past, present, and future and sells us not with passions but with sound arguments and logical appeals. The abdication of the second means a culture largely driven by emotions, passions, and enticing images rather than sound arguments, logic, and careful reasoning. "With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present." Christianity What really caught my interest was Postman's analysis of the affect of Television on religion, particularly Christianity. The Christian Revivals of the early days of America were headed by religious intellectual giants like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, but the religious Revivals of today are led by religious show entertainers with shallow doctrines and emotional appeals. "It would be a serious mistake to think of Billy Graham or any other television revivalist as a latter-day Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney. Edwards was one of the most brilliant and creative minds ever produced by America. His contribution to aesthetic theory was almost as important as his contribution to theology. His interests were mostly academic; he spent long hours each day in his study. He did not speak to his audiences extemporaneously. He read his sermons, which were tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions of theological doctrine...religious thought and institutions in America were dominated by an austere, learned, and intellectual form of discourse that is largely absent from religious life today." "I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether." Too Much News Are you tired of reading the news? I am, and I believe Postman is absolutely correct in his analysis that the advent of the telegraph made everything relevant or irrelevant into "news", whether it be Snoop Dog changing his name to Snoop Lion, the reoccurring event that some new celebrity insanity has shaved her head, or the ridiculous name of the baby of some movie actress marriage that only lasts for a year. All news is news whether it is irrelevant to us or not. "...most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action." What Can We Do? The inevitable question is: What can we do to put a stop to this degeneration of culture? The answer is simple: Think! This involves actually reading books, and teaching yourself to analyze rather than just accepting TV. You cannot get by today without reading good books. Reading is the process and practice of ordering, analyzing, discerning, categorizing, and reasoning and you cannot be an intelligent person if you do not have a healthy intake of good challenging books. "But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple." Is This Just Culture Whining? One possible objection to reading this book is: isn't this just another person whining about the ills of society and banging their cup against the ground in objection? Fair enough, I asked the same question when reading this book, several times. Consider how we are adamantly opposed to external slavery as a nation. We broke away from tyranny from the start and we have been a nation of "freedom" and "liberty" ever since. It is not culture whining to decry an externally caused force of tyranny. This is the same tyrrany all the same, it is just disguised as an internal form of slavery, where our desires control us, and our own passions turn our culture into slaves of our own trivialities. "Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?"

In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published a book called Common Sense: The Origin and Design of Government. It sold 100,000 copies in the first two months. Today, a book would have to sell 11,000,000 copies to match the proportion of the population that Paine’s book reached. Common Sense went on to print somewhere between 300,000-400,000 copies, equivalent to somewhere between 33,000,000-44,000,000 people today. As Postman notes in Amusing Ourselves to Death, the “only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Superbowl.” In the mid 1800s, Abraham Lincoln and one of his political adversaries (Stephen A. Douglas) used to have public debates that lasted hours. Each participant would get a minimum of an hour of speaking time before the other rose for a rebuttal, and debates could often last upwards of 4 hours. What is even more remarkable is that the audience of regular common people was rapt with attention for the entire affair. Today, politicians are given 1 minute to give an opinion on a major issue and their opponent is expected to keep their rebuttal to 30 seconds. So, there is a definitive difference in the mainstream intelligence of people from our past in comparison to people today. How did this come to be? Postman posits that it is due to the rise of television as our main source of information gathering. In the 17th and 18th centuries ideas were shared via writing (and if you go back father, to the days of humanity before writing and reading were wide-spread, when ideas were only shared orally, the scholars and politicians of the day were those select men with a knack for oratorical skills.) Postman notes how the first fifteen presidents of the United States most likely wouldn’t have been recognized by their citizens on the street, yet those same citizens could have identified them by their latest speech or piece of distributed writing. Today, things are quite different. Postman wrote this book in the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan was president—a man who was previously a big time Hollywood actor in the 1960s and built a national reputation as someone on the silver screen. Even more recently we endured the presidency of Donald Trump, the former host of a reality television series. Was Donald Trump a good politician? The debate is still out. Is he entertaining? Absolutely—he is the most entertaining politician we have ever had in the age of television and I personally am not surprised at all that he is the most popular politician in the United States right now. The core argument of Postman’s book is not only that television changed how we receive information, but it changed our entire relationship to information on an epistemological level. Whereas writing is geared towards conceptual thinking, sequential order, careful reasoning, objectivity, and a delayed response, television is meant for entertainment. Television, with its constantly moving pictures and engaging sound effects, is meant to be amusing. When we indulge in TV for entertainment’s sake, sinking into the couch after a hard day’s work to watch our favorite half hour comedy, that is not the TV that Postman is talking about. The TV that has decimated attention spans and amused us to a breaking point is the TV that has infiltrated our religions, our politics, and our education systems. “As a television show, and a good one,” Postman writes, “Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.” With television’s incorporation of the news cycle, our ways of learning about the world are also stunted. We get a story about the Middle East, and then a minute later we’re hearing about gridlock in the Senate, quickly followed by a story about a dog riding a crocodile in Florida. These are all entertaining stories to be sure, but what do they all have in common? For 99% of us, they have no impact on our daily lives. Do I wish there was less violence in the Middle East? Of course. What can I actually do about it? Essentially nothing. With all the graphic images and sounds coming out of the television screen, however, it is incredibly engaging and I can’t look away! Television is designed to make everything it touches entertaining, and it has infiltrated our culture so much so that with the advancement of the internet and social media, the trends in this book have only exacerbated. “The form in which ideas are expressed affects what those idea will be,” Postman writes, and I couldn’t agree more. We the people now expect everything in life, whether it be news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion, etc., to entertain us. If it doesn’t, we don’t want it. Personally, I believe that our culture would benefit tremendously from a return to typography—a large part of the reason why I started reading and writing book reviews in the first place. Books are where real education lies, and in my opinion a better education is the way towards a better future. The internet has recently made huge swaths of information readily available (thanks Wikipedia!) so we now must take focus from what we are learning and return focus to how we go about learning it.

The medium in which a society communicates influences how people think about issues. Information is not only provided through an instrument such as print or television, the delivery method does much to shape how this information is processed and considered. Unfortunately, not many individuals consider how mediums such as oral communication, print communication, and technological communication shape public discourse and impact serious issues. Within his classic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman offers a wake-up call to readers willing to see how an uncritical embrace of all new technology can weaken rather than strengthen culture. In the opening chapters, author and professor Neil Postman contrasts two versions of a dystopian future. Orwell's 1984 spoke of a bleak society in which thought was controlled by the state and tyranny reigned through oppression. However, Huxley's Brave New World spoke to a rather different scenario altogether. It pointed to a future in which people were willingly kept under control because they failed to see their own imprisonment. They had been so distracted by trivialities and entertainment that distraction from real life served as their chains. It is this second picture that Postman holds up as accurate. He argues that television tends to turn everything into entertainment. While sitcoms and dramatic stories pose no great threat, subjects such as news, politics, religion, and science become trivialized. People are presented with numerous bits of information in rapid fire succession with no great time for reflection, consideration, and proper action. In the end, people learn "of" many things but "about" very little. Although dated in its illustrations that are culled from the 1980's society in which it was written, the words of Neil Postman have become almost prophetic. Even before the rise of computers and the internet, the author sees how quickly subjects such as history, philosophy, and religion are disregarded for the ever-present now. Classrooms and church sanctuaries have sought to emulate the style of media screens. Political discourse has more to do with image than content. People will often embrace new ideas not because they are well thought out systems of thought, but because they look appealing as presented by the corporate media. Social norms held for centuries are abandoned in an instant with no thought of consequences. However, this descent into greater and greater triviality does not have to continue. If one understands the way in which a medium changes thought patterns, it can be reversed. Neil Postman's book stands as one enduring work that helps to accomplish just such a goal. (On a final note, as a pastor this book serves as a great help in considering the shape of worship services and church life. Rather than trying to turn Christianity into a second-rate television show, scripture calls for a serious consideration of God's word. This involves thought, reflection, and application on a level vastly different than that required by television screens.)

Although there's definitely a temptation for us to amuse ourselves to death with things that have always had the intent of amusement (sitcoms, dramas, sci-fi, fantasy, etc), Neil Postman has nothing bad to say about "junk television" (as it's called in the introduction). Rather, his very compelling argument is that we're turning into a society that will amuse itself to death because our capacity to comprehend and act on things is transforming into one that only operates on amusement itself. In other words, it's not that we make things for the sake of amusement that will hurt us, it's that we now make everything - even things that are not meant to be amusing - into a venue of entertainment. While originally published in 1985, I sincerely think this book is just as relevant today (in the age of Google, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter) if not even more so than when it was first penned. Postman takes the reader through the history of our mediums of communication and shows (and I mean, really shows from history) that when our culture of communication started to turn from the printed word to visual images, our capacity to think through things cogently had started to drop significantly. Our attention span has taken a terrible plummet. And even our humanity has been desensitized to a degree. In just this short book (163 pages), he shows so effectively that when we watch TV for things like news, education, religion, we're not being given news, education, or religion - we're being given entertainment (in the sense of amusement for amusement's sake). A succinct summary from his son in the introduction puts it well: "Silence has been replaced by background noise. ... [He did not] fear TV across the board (as some thought). Junk television was fine. "The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health," he wrote. "60 Minutes, Eyewitness News, and Sesame Street are" (ix, xv). The whole time reading through this, I couldn't help but to think of how many more mediums have been affected by this same thing since 1985. And it's very difficult to number them. And it's very hard not to see the whole realm of news, politics, education, and even many churches truly living out what he saw so long ago. Throughout the book he contrasts the two novels of Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and 1984, by George Orwell. Whereas 1984 predicts a world governed by coercion from the state, Brave New World predicts a world governed by hedonism. Or, as Postman put it: "In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. ... This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell was right" (xx). And Postman does a very great job of demonstrating that possibility. Regardless of your own conclusions at the end of the book (I know I have some of my own), I do think it would be nearly impossible to read this and not be affected in how you view TV or the internet, or all sorts of other avenues of communication. And while I don't think Neil Postman was a Christian (in the Biblical sense of the term), I have no hesitation recommending this very thoughtful work on the evaluation of our culture. Even though it was published almost 30 years ago, it's very applicable even today.

I bought this because it's clear that our society is obsessed with being entertained and I wanted a little more perspective on it. This book was written in the 1980s when most people were still watching network TV and just beginning to seriously ignore printed media like books and newspapers. While it seems outdated, the author's premises are still sound. Everything he points out is only compounded by the advent of cable TV, a myriad of streaming services with endless TV shows and movies, most kids having screen access 8 hours a day, Internet browsing, social media addiction, constant text messaging, and now the onslaught of AI. The AI slop is so convincing that our brains can't even tell what's real anymore. One of his premises is that printed language is essential for conceptual, abstract thinking, and that simply can't be translated to visual media. The further away from print we get, we trade learning for amusement, and the stupider we become.

I was only recently made aware of this book but the content of it seems more relevant than ever. Written in a time in which television was increasingly becoming the dominant medium of communication, Neil Postman wrote about the dangers of assuming the medium was independent of the depth of discourse and in particular how television and entertainment obsession has come at the expense of informedness of the public. Despite this resonating to many as it was written 40 years ago, its applicability to the meme era sees all the more relevant as we stoop to new lows on having our technology cater to our shortest term attention spans. The book starts with highlighting the style of discourse of 19th century in the United States as proxied by the Lincoln debates. In particular the author highlights the nature of debate was based on the style of the written word and that the written word is a much more thoughtful and deliberate style than the spoken word given its permanence. This is probably the most important point in that the style of discourse affects the content of that discourse and the age of entertainment has debased the content. The author, speaking in his time, highlights that physical attractiveness was becoming the sole determinant of whether a politician would win, argued that television was changing debate and discourse to a culture of entertainment. This was then likened to a slow migration to a dystopian America closer to Brave New World despite the times in which 1984 was the larger concern in the midst of the Cold War. The author then expands on the ways in which television was creating an oversaturation of content with an underserving of meaning. He highlighted how the 24/7 news cycle provided people with information but no real context leading people with the false impression that they are informed despite having little dependable knowledge. It would seem today such phenomenon are getting worse in which technology at ones fingertips substitutes for having a memory of facts and figures that form an independent world view. The author goes on to highlight that education on TV is narrowly being applauded for all the wrong reasons, namely that the subjects are chosen for TV rather than TV is a preferred medium for education. Reviewing the book is a bit strange as the value of it lies in its observations on the culture of communication and debate rather than its observations on the time. For those observations of how discourse is affected by our mediums of exchange I believe the author has highlighted something critical that we have completely lost control over. As our mediums of exchange have coincided with more and more fractured politics and tribalism and despite many's awareness of the coincidence, we do nothing about impeding the technology's unintended consequences. That foreign policy is seemingly done on Twitter is not an evolution but a dystopian reality we now live in. The reasons for all of this are more complex than what the book could have ever foreseen but I am a believer that part of the reason stems from the observations of this book.

As anyone who follows my reviews likely knows, I am a big fan of George Orwell and, though I've read Huxley's Brave New World, it never burrowed its way into my mind the way 1984 did. Recently, however, a colleague of mine was teaching both novels in comparison, and used the forward to Amusing Ourselves to Death as an inspiration. Somehow, I had never heard of this book, but I was so interested by my colleague's use of bits and pieces of it, that I decided I needed to read it. I'm only sorry that it took so long for me to find out about Postman's work. This book is amazingly good. There are so many excellent things here that I don't think I can really summarize effectively. Here are a few things that remain stuck in my mind: the difference between the typographic mind and the television mind. Postman foretold critically what we are now seeing physiologically--that modern media has changed the way we think. (See Prensky's work for applications to the rising of computers and gaming.) Groundlings could stand for 3 - 4 hours watching a Shakespearean play. Citizens could spend 6 - 8 hours listening to Lincoln and Douglas debate issues for a Senate seat. Today, even our most "well-read" intellectual would find such things bordering on the intolerable. Our minds simply are trained to handle such things anymore. In place of debate, we have talking points, though Postman doesn't use this term. But when he describes the televised "debate" over the then-controversial TV movie The Day After, which I remember but had never considered as critically as Postman, he begins to show that TV simply doesn't allow for true debate by its nature. Television makes it nearly impossible for real engagement between people and extended discussion of issues. Instead, we are left with "news" that isn't news as all. It is either an entertainment or it is a filler with no direct impact on our lives, or both. Postman has a fascinating discussion of how this new form of "news" arose with the arrival of the telegraph and has exploded in the world of television. He shows how we have become inundated by "flashes" of things that have no real impact on our lives and make us aware of things we can do little or nothing about: famines, floods, foreign elections, distant wars, etc. It comes at us moment by moment, day after day, and distracts us from real engagement with things about which we should be concerned. Postman also deserves credit for a few things beyond these very engaging criticisms of our modern culture. First, he doesn't disparage TV. He understands that junk is what TV is about and he's OK with that on some level. He simply wants us to be aware that TV is simply not capable of working on a higher plane and we shouldn't think it is. Second, it is amazing how Postman's ideas have become more, not less relevant, in a world of 24-hour cable, the internet, and world-wide cell phone access. Postman has really nailed something important here and this is a book that should be read by everyone.

While I found some of his arguments dated (partially due to the fact of when it was published), this book made me more conscientious in the way i engage with the media i consume. It intrigued me in its discussion or how we conceive things to be (i.e time) and the way we process information with respect to the changes in time. The increasing focus on superficial appeals elucidate the lack of ‘true’ value that these images we see on our screens hold when it detracts from their original intent (i.e televised political debates). the focus on trivialities such as appearances has manifested its malignancy in our culture today (just as it did in the past from Reagan to Trump). The didactic nature of the book makes it seem as if he is preaching to you, but it would be ironic to take his word as truth rather than process it and in so doing, mindlessly amusing ourselves with his words (passively absorbing). I didn’t really enjoy certain parts for it’s rather aggressive dismay towards television and it’s role in displacing reading, but that could also be a personal thing. (i’ll add more next time if i feel like it but this was an ok. read)

Recomendo muito bom

Even though it was written many years ago, this book is a must read for anyone qho want to understand our society today. The same goes for Aldous Huxley "A brave New World". Two masterpieces.

Highly recommended

Essays that are a few decades old can sometime fall into irrelevance, this is not the case here. A lot of the issues raised in this book from the golden age of television are still valid today in the age of social networks.

Was really looking forward to reading this book but the paper is such poor quality and the font so small that I’m finding it difficult to actually read.