Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

It's amazing how well this book has stood the test of time. We are still amusing ourselves to death, though now we have a new medium, the Internet. Our world is even more fragmented, more information overload, but the Internet restores typography to an extent, in bite size chunks. I wonder what Postman would had thought of Twitter. ( )

Very prescient. Very scary. I've been saying all along that we live in a dystopian society in this country, and Postman's book gives me more proof. Fantastic read. ( )

Overview
This book is about America's shift from the "Age of Typography" to the "Age of Television" and the effects of television on education and society. The first section concentrates on the written word, while the second part focuses on television and education. Throughout the book, Postman contrasts Orwell and Huxley’s vision of the future. Orwell thought oppressive government would be the downfall society, while Huxley thought we would self-destruct or "amuse ourselves to death". Postman uses this vision of Huxley's to frame the book.

The Good
Much has been written about the book, so I'm going to keep the positive comments brief. Postman shows how the “written word” leads to knowledge in a way television is unable to compete with. For example books promote analytical thought, argumentation, analysis, etc. On the other hand, television is a visual media of simplicity and entertainment. Postman makes an interesting point on the influence of televangelism on religion. One dramatic change on religion is ritual and scared space. Today churches are copying television productions, and sometimes rivaling them, with theatrics and concerts. Ritual and scared space is no longer there. I’ve witnessed this at a church called Willow Creek in South Barrington, Illinois. Take a quick glimpse at their website to see what I mean.

Weakness & Disagreements
Now for the ugly. Postman’s arguments live in a 1985 black-and-white world. Postman claims the written word is superior to the visual medium of television. This is not always true. Most books sold today fall into the category of entertainment not education. Just because something is in a written form doesn’t not mean its superior. Postman wouldn’t disagree with this; but, it’s a weakness in his argument.

Postman also states educational programs, and photography, have little value. I disagree. Reading descriptions of the Holocaust, is much different than viewing historical pictures and videos of the event. There is also no written equivalent of travelling back in time to a historical event through the medium of television. Educational programs are not bad and can be beneficial if supplemented with a book. The keyword is supplemented. Educational television should not be a replacement for book learning, which I believe is Postman’s main point. I will also grant Postman some slack, since he is writing on the cusp of educational programming and Distance Learning;but he does appear to have a thing against Cookie Monster and Big Bird.

The problem with television is time. Simply put, people spend too much time watching television. Why not spend an hour on the treadmill, an hour reading, and an hour watching television? Spice it up a little. This would be beneficial, but yet, most people would rather stay on the couch. Why? Perhaps the same reason why people eat unhealthy food – they like it. I just happen to like to reading books and learning, and the majority of society would rather watch television. One could say its human nature to be “amused to death”. So I do arrive at the same resting point as Postman. Lucky for us, biology was nice.

1. The Medium is the Metaphor
The shift from the written word to electronics.

2. Media as Epistemology
How media changes how we acquire knowledge.

3. Typographic America
The printing press and education for the masses.

4. The Typographic Mind [Fantastic Chapter]
The medium of the written word and it's history in America.

5. Peek-a-Boo World
The telegraph and the photograph - the beginning of trouble.

6. The Age of Show Business
The problem with Television.

7. Now . . . This
Problems with the news being packaged as entertainment.

8. Shuffle Off to Bethlehem
Televangelism and the religious experience.

9. Reach Out and Elect Someone
Advertising and Politics.

10. Teaching as an Amusing Activity
How television damages education.

11. The Huxleyan Warning
How do we approach a solution? ( )

Postman is right to point out that every non-natural tool of humankind, from the most sophisticated computer or medical imaging device to the alphabet and a hammer, is a piece of technology. It is rather moving to contemplate that there was a time when every non-natural thing we take for granted in our world, from simple pottery to the wheel was at one time the state-of-the-art. Postman warns us that all technologies are potentially harmful- the major specter brought by our cumulative increase in technological sophistication is an exponential increase in our capacity for destructiveness. Postman rightly posited that all technological change is "ecological, not additive": in Postman’s example of (and fascination with) television, the advent of the boob tube did not equal America plus television, it rendered an entirely different culture that buried our previous one.

It could be said with only some degree of abstraction that the wars that devastated Europe in the first half of the twentieth century were violent reactions fostered by a neurotic compulsion to deny the observations of individuals like Freud, but with different tactics. World War I was a war whose ideology was extremely old-fashioned and antiquated, and entirely untenable given the major advancements in knowledge being made with little or no awareness of the monarchies. Ironically, this war was fought with the most advanced weaponry to that time, albeit largely contained within humble trenches that magnified the destructiveness. Cultures that had failed to maturely adapt to the technological changes had gleaming tanks, massive howitzers, airplanes and machine guns utilized within a most primitive framework. Then, the next world war pushed the technology envelope far further, and couched it within fascism and national socialism, cousin ideologies that schizophrenically billed themselves as ultra-modern even as they peddled an intense nostalgia for an idealized past that never existed. The toxic combination of high technology and moribund, reactionary culture leads to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

What astonishes me is to contemplate how World War II narrowly delayed epoch-making technologies that were on tap, but shunted aside for war production. Can you imagine Hitler on television, or the death camps run by sophisticated bureaucrats with IBM mainframes and electronically-controlled railroad switching? Richard Nixon, generally regarded as an utterly uncompelling black hole of charisma, won a place in the hearts of middle America during the 1952 campaign when he came into their living room and earnestly talked about his daughters’ cocker spaniel. How much more thoroughly could Hitler have manipulated his countrymen and the world with such technological capability at his fingertips? (Or would his style have been too hot for a cool medium like television?) Conversely, what if the internet, video games, and 500-channel cable television had been mainstream in the early 1970s? Would the country have been as fixated on Watergate had their ability to tune in and drop out been comparable to ours in the present day? I believe that such exercises in counterfactual history can be more than parlor games if one considers how our world as it is now would be construed if we were not endowed with such technological advances.

Postman was an extremely thought-provoking media theorist. ( )

I have been recently reading to quite a few articles and listening to several programs on how our modern forms of media are subtly rewiring our brains to be less thoughtful and less able to maintain an attention span longer than the length of the average image on television; that is to say, not very long. This is something that a lot of us are seeing today and wondering what to do about it. Neil Postman saw it back in 1984, and his warning should be heeded still. Because of discussions on this topic, this book was loaned to me, and I am thankful for it.

Our instinct is to turn to more intelligent programs rather than watching the fluff on television. But Postman's concern is not the content of what we are watching, but the form. It is not that the History Channel has very many interesting and educational programs. It is that even the History Channel's way of presenting them is doing more harm than good.

Contrary to what we've been taught, the medium used itself carries something with it. Television in particular has come at a high cost by the very fact that it because our source for all information for some time. Postman might write about the smart phone today, if he were alive. The situation was become more dire, since it is no longer a very heavy box in our living room that is controlling the flow of information, but a very light box in our pockets. No longer is work or the restaurant a break from media, but we are very willing to read a text at the table.

The solution here is awareness. It is rather difficult to survive in business anymore without at least a computer, if not a smart phone. These are not things we can do without anymore. But being aware of what is happening to us may change the way we approach things. Our business typically want us to be multi-taskers, jumping from project to project. This book, as well as those other articles I've been reading, have convinced me that maybe it would be very good for my brain to sit down with a book in the evening and read for a while. ( )