Neil Postman (1931–2003)

Part one is a brilliant exposition of the history of our media mediums. From print, and the early phenomenal strength of The American literary tradition, to our anti-intellectual rise starting with the “news” snippet culture of the telegraph ( “To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing OF lots of things, not knowing ABOUT them.” P 70) and the contextless photographic image which culminates (in this book written in 1985) in the age of the television. Well, the thesis has been show more proven. We are a thoroughly unserious nation in 2022. Worse yet, we long for the days of 1985 television in which at least there was a shared cultural experience. Today in the computer age we are all separate disjointed individuated info consumers, whether that info be true or false matters not. It only matters how we feel about any factum. Huxley was the more prescient dystopian view and we are living in it. show less

An extended essay. Lively, but a little slipshod. On the other hand, vigorously written, humorous and full of pithy quotables. Also, it gave me a new enthusiasm for reading Huxley's "Brave New World" in which Huxley satirizes our contemporary society from almost 100 years ago. Dead on.

This was so much fun to read that I'm taking notes for an extended review.

Foreword:
Huxley and Orwell. Huxley's vision has overtaken us! Fine quotable:

"
As he [Huxley] saw it, people will come to love their show more oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture...Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."

1. The Medium is the Metaphor
Politics has become entertainment. Politics is done on TV, so looking good on TV is important. Of course, Trump always looks ugly and odious, so I don't think mere appearance is as important as Postman was making it out to be in the 80s. Those who speak the news on television do have to look good, though. We are surrounded by vacuity. People deplore this with various explanations: "that what is happening is the residue of an exhausted capitalism; or, on the contrary, that it is the tasteless fruit of the maturing of capitalism; or that it is the neurotic aftermath of the age of Freud; or the retribution of our allowing God to perish; or that it comes from the old stand-bys, greed and ambition". Postman presents the argument that it is the medium in which public discourse is conducted, i.e., television rather than text, that has changed the content and character of public discourse. The reason for this is that television is all about visual imagery. We get breaking, up-to-the-minute news because the telegraph and subsequent technology allows the immediate transfer over large distances of little bits of de-contextualized information. "The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is, quite precisely, a media event." He argues that the commandment in the Decalogue against graven images is really an instruction about media, that the God of the Bible is an abstract god, and to make a concrete representation, a statue of such, will screw up the discourse. This is an unusual interpretation, but plausible. McLuhan said that "The Medium is the Message", but Postman prefers "The Medium is the Metaphor". Lewis Mumford pointed out how technologies introduce metaphors that were previously unavailable. The mechanical clock gave a way of dividing time. The introduction of writing of every sort certainly changed the way people interacted with language and with each other. But, what metaphor does television brings us? Postman says that media-metaphors are not so obvious as clock and writing.

Quotations:

"We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it."

"The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is, quite precisely, a media event."

"the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation."

"The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it recreates the past in the present, and gives it, not the familiar remembered things, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination." -- Northrop Frye

2.Media as Epistemology
Epistemology is the study of knowledge, what it is, how we get it. Northrop Frye had this idea of "resonance", whereby things get taken out of their original context and acquire a more universal meaning. The idea of resonance and the idea of metaphor are closely linked, since something can resonate as a metaphor. For example, Hamlet, just a character in a play, become a metaphor for "brooding indecisiveness". Every medium of communication has resonance. Cultural notions of truth: parables, oral vs. written testimony in a court of law, logical inference before the inventions of science, quantification. Books, at least non-fiction, can be tough going. There is the need to keep track of complicated arguments, to withhold judgement, to consider abstractions, etc. If you expect to get your knowledge from books, you expect your knowledge or truth to have bookish characteristics. Three final points. 1. Not asserting that television changes the very structure of our minds, just the structure of our discourse. 2. The changes induced by television are not all consuming: people still read books, after all. 3. The topic is restricted to political discourse. The political discourse induced by print medium was superior to that induced by television.

3. Typographic America
For a few hundred years the settlers in the US were the most literate group of people on the planet. Thomas Paine's Common Sense was an immense bestseller, and nobody even thought to question that he had written this eloquent work, even though he had brought up on the lowest end of the economic scale. There was no reading elite, all people read all the time. In large part, though, they read books from England, and the only output from local authors in colonial times were pamphlets. Later, there were the lecture circuits. And of course, Dickens was lionized when he came to the US.

4. The Typographic Mind
More examples of print-based culture. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, long, intricate, full of complicated sentences. Advertising described what was sold. There was an implicit assumption that the reader was a rational human being. It is hard to write an English sentence that fails to make some claim or other.

5. The Peek-A-Boo World
The telegraph introduces de-contextualized facts about things happening far away. The photograph gives the news of the telegraph a kind of context and vice-versa. The information to action ratio is increased a thousandfold. Knowing consists in knowing of, rather than knowing about. All this knowing needs an outlet because there is no action that can be taken based on this information; therefore quiz shows and Trivial Pursuit. Impotence, irrelevance, incoherence.

Part II

6. The Age of Show Business
"Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television." Everything is being made into something that can play well on television. "Debates" between political candidates are not debates, they are merely contests.

7. Now...this
New is fragmented into brief segments, and presented without weight. Magazines and newspaper strive to imitate TV. All statements are taken out of context so that the idea of contradiction becomes meaningless.
"Credibility" is not based on whether or not you tell the truth, but how trustworthy your appearance is.

8. Shuffle off to Bethlehem
Religion is entertainment. And not just the televangelists but also the Catholic church. Television does probably filter out what makes religious services worth going to, but I have observed that people do it anyway.

9. Reach out and Elect Someone
From commercial "Reach out, reach out and touch someone" for AT&T. Commercials are the means by which politicians are elected. Commercials have ceased to make claims for the product. They are all about what is wrong with the viewer. Television commercials use pseudo-parables: the ring around the collar, the phone call from the son far away, etc. Everything is fixed in an instant. Being a celebrity vs. being well-known. You are a celebrity when you become the entertainment. "Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment - and cares."

10. Teaching as an Amusing Activity
Using television for teaching teaches that all learning must come in the form of entertainment. No pre-requisites, no perplexity, no exposition. Teachers ape television w/ dumb jokes and clowning.

11. The Huxleyan Warning
"Brave New World" is here! No realistic solutions proposed, but how could there be?
"Until, years from now, when it will be notice that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved."

This book contains a bunch of sweeping assertions that are probably more appropriate to a novel than a serious essay. But the writing is so good, the insights so enlightening, that it deserves that five star rating.

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A useful summary with numerous quotations can be found here:
https://mentalpivot.com/book-notes-amusing-ourselves-to-death-by-neil-postman/

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Reread in 2021, and it's right now. I only wish that Postman were here to explain what Twitter and Facebook have done to "typographic discourse". Maybe I need to write that book myself.

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Listened in 2022. Noticed that it is miscatalogued by Middleton-Flint public library as YA. It's not inappropriate for YA, mature teens will probably enjoy the snark if they get nothing else out of it, but it was written for adults, like everything else by Neil Postman. Boxford library has it in YA SUMMER Reading; that is appropriate, since often high school students are encouraged or required to read adult books, e.g., "Brave New World" for their courses.

Sadly, my home library has removed it from its shelves entirely, possibly due to the condition of the book, but the audio is now being made available, and I was able to take advantage of that. show less

There's a good feeling you get when you read a book that accurately criticizes something that needs it. If you've ever felt like watching TV was a waste of time, this book will impart such a feeling.

Not to mention, providing an arsenal of reasons why TV is a general waste of time.

Why, just two days ago my 3rd grade students asked me why the 4th graders at our school always get to watch videos in class and we don't.

With Postman's support in my back pocket I explained that TV was nothing more show more than entertainment. While there may be a great deal of programs on TV from which something might be learned, TV makes it appear as though all learning is or should be fun, when in reality a true education is wrought through critical thinking and some honest hard work. TV demands neither of these, and those who become accustomed to it exhibit similar behaviors when either TV or education (or perhaps anything else displayed on the telly-bunkum-box as just entertainment) becomes less than pleasing: switching off.

Entertainment is one thing, and that's fine. But education, news, politics, courts, science, and religion are another. TV, by its natures, rolls everything into show-business, and culture follows suit.

If reading books was ever important to you, read this book. show less

Neil Postman is currently spinning in his grave, yelling "I told you so! I told you so!"

In this book, he argues that the US has become a technopoly, which he defines as a culture where the needs of technology are more important as drivers of change then the needs of humans, where efficiency is valued above all else, and where we have a glut of information that is unmitigated by any kind of moral or intellectual filters. This was a pretty decent description of segments of the US in 1992, but show more it pretty much describes the whole world now.

In some ways, he reads like an angry old crank yelling about the kids these days and their lack of religion/philosophy/morality. On the other hand, he sure does have a point, especially when he talks about our unfiltered access to way too much information and how that makes all information meaningless. He didn't take it to the next step, where we are so vulnerable to misinformation that we are willing to overthrow democracy because we believe a bunch of lies, but I think he would be totally unsurprised that technocracy has led us to this point.

Postman offers some semblance of a solution in his final chapter, which is a new approach to school curriculum, which maybe seemed remotely achievable in 1992 but is laughably naive now. show less