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

This book, originally published in 1985, warns against the proliferation of television media replacing printed texts. Much of Postman’s case comes across as a tome against television and cites renowned authors like Aldous Huxley and Marshall McLuhan in support of his thesis. However, 35-40 years after its original publishing, it’s easy to see how digital media (i.e., the computer and the Internet) have continued to revolutionize America’s information intake. Our goal now is simply to keep up with the “fire hydrant” of information output instead of merely choosing one technology over another. Yes, the goal is simply to learn and retain from all media instead of to privilege one over the other. In this sense, the book falls show more sorely short of anticipating future conundrums.

Postman rightly observes how television media tends to put us to sleep instead of making us engaged learners. That’s why I am still a passionate advocate of book learning. His emphasis on understanding the forms of media is likewise appreciated. However, Postman idealizes a past age (in the 1800s) when books and newspapers were the main/only form of educational technology. He sees this as a golden age that we need to return to. He forgets how much rote memorization was required then in education and how social inequities like slavery, discrimination, and a lack of women’s suffrage persisted in that age. Technology also has its benefits – say, speeding up social economies, which produces greater wealth.

Postman’s basic premise is that television is bad and traditional reading is good. This is a false dichotomy, I suggest. While I wholeheartedly support becoming aware of pro’s and con’s of various forms of media, the challenge becomes to learn to learn from all forms of media. When learning itself becomes a passion, it ultimately selects between forms of media appropriately. A “culture war” against one form of media – which is what Postman seems to suggest – distracts from the point. I’m not sure how his thesis would have been received in 1985, but in 2022, “the age of show business” has become the “information age.” New challenges of a hyper-connected world confront us. This book, for all its timeliness in the 1980s, does not predict these future challenges. I still suggest reading McLuhan (an author Postman relies upon) instead of this work for a more universal paradigm of media. show less

Dated in a chilling way. Postman's central thesis that television is/was the dominant medium of the late 20th century is quaint because it's half right: literacy and engagement through the written word are dead; but television's reign would be a short one.

But the issues he predicted: demogauguery, disinformation, and detachment are absolutely the central problems of the modern age that tv helped build.

I can't believe this was published almost 40 years ago. The introduction said it better than I could: "This is a 21st-century book published in the 20th century." Amusing Ourselves to Death is a clarion call to the inherent civic dangers when the written word is no longer the primary medium of expression. Postman argues that when we turn towards the segmented and corporate television set, not only is our society's conversational and debate ability suffer, it changes the literal makeup of thought. It's eerily prescient in a day of all-consuming social media and a sizable amount of the country addicted to TikTok, somehow an even more dystopian iteration of the moving image.

I didn't think this book would be as good as it was: it's show more coherently structured, based on strong historical reasoning, and generally very well-written. Not only that, but it's comfortable to read. While a bit dense, it feels like eating your grandmother's kitchen-sink stew: not always easy to get down, but so, so good for you. show less

Great book, amazingly prescient for its time (written in the mid-1980s).

Touches on lots of different ideas and themes around public discourse. My favorite is how the age of the telegraph and beyond basically created what we call "news"... information that doesn't affect our daily lives and that we have nothing we can do about it/with it, but is delivered to us anyways because that's what the medium does.

It's basically a more in-depth version of "Society of the Spectacle".

My one complaint is that the first part of the book is devoted to a mythologized "age of reason" which was during the height of the printing press, just pre-telegraph. Back then, public discourse was based on the written word rather than on image, and the author argues show more this makes for better public discourse.

I disagree. This was the height of colonialism, with elaborate-reasoned justifications around the world for mass-scale atrocities. Having well-reasoned arguments does not make them better than, say, compelling visual arguments. You can create a well-reasoned document justifying the Vietnam war, and can counter with 3 minutes of real-life war footage and have the latter be better than the former. I think the only difference is that we've been taught the ins-and-outs of reasoned discourse in school, so we can understand, critique and deconstruct it better. We generally haven't been taught the ins-and-outs of visual media (like TV), so we can't talk about it in the same way.

In the end, the best way to deal with new media (TV, Twitter, YouTube) is with better media literacy, which is actually the exact thing the author advocates show less

This book makes two good points: the media used to communicate affects the nature of the communication, and much of modern communication on serious matters is frivolous.

That covers the first part of the book. The rest is a tiresome rant about how TV is ruining us all. The details of the rant are not worth covering, but I do think that Postman misses some important points. First, he never looks to see if there is any good in a visual based communication style. It is true, as he states, that a medium such as television emphasizes emotional impact over rational argument, but emotion can be a powerful motivator. An image of the damage from an earthquake or a hurricane can inspire someone to help when a description of the damage may not. show more Even on a rational level, a picture can be worth a thousand words as anyone who has ever tried to learn knitting can tell you.

Postman only gives the slightest of nods to the fact that textual communication can also be banal. See your favorite social network for more details.

A better approach than Postman's, which declares that TV is bad and text is good, is to realize that different communication mediums have different strengths and weaknesses. Television is excellent at providing entertainment, but that is not the only thing it is good for. No media should be the only mode of discourse. Ideally, they should be used to support and reinforce each other. show less

A perceptive look at US popular media - predominantly television - dating from 1985, though still relevant more than thirty years later. It takes only a very small adjustment of the imagination to add social media to the analysis, and that analysis still comes up strong.

We are more fortunate in the UK (in that we have the BBC, which by not taking advertising does not have to chase the ratings and the eight-minute attention span to the same degree), but we cannot afford complacency. Much of what is in this book I can see in our own media.

Equally, there are other voices in America who are aware of this problem and work against it. But they are a minority.

Interestingly, I'm re-watching 'Battlestar Galactica' (the re-boot) at the moment. It show more is a well-crafted show, with good plots (at least, until it got to the point where the show-runners ran out of ideas and began making stuff - especially mystical stuff - up as they went along), an interesting premise and a range of issues. But I notice two things about it: 1) episodes are shorter than their equivalents for 'Star Trek' or 'Babylon 5', reflecting longer advert breaks; and (perhaps more importantly), 2) by the story being set in a non-Earth society, the cultural references that the other shows inserted in the scripts - because Roddenberry and Straczinski are/were themselves educated people who wanted to share that education - are not present. The earlier shows 'sneaked' references into their stories that would take the inquisitive viewer into a wider world of cultural exposure; but by the opening of the 21st century, a science fiction show like 'Galactica' that was complex and demanding in terms of its narrative no longer felt a need to expand its viewers' consciousnesses as well. Postman's hypothesis wins out in the end, it seems.

We see the eight-minute attention span reflected in documentaries in the UK as well - sometimes even in BBC documentaries that are intended to be sold abroad, as they have to conform to a commercial tv pattern (watching popular BBC documentary shows, I can often pick out where the adverts will go when the show is re-broadcast on a commercial channel). On completely commercially-originated documentaries, this is reflected in the recapitulation of "the story so far" when the show comes back after the commercial break.

I found the chapter on US tele-evangelism very interesting. It suggests one reason why Islam is mis-represented so much in mainstream media, because (on my reading), the messages of Islam do not suggest ways of making yourself feel good, but in doing the right thing. And that can't be reduced to an eight-minute sound-bite that reinforces other, less spiritual messages that the medium wants to promote at the same time.

I'd like to think that UK audiences are sufficiently sophisticated to spot these sort of issues. (Perhaps one reason why there are segments of the UK political world who decry college and university 'media studies' courses, because those courses enable those who have done them to analyse and deconstruct what they are seeing.) (Hopefully.) In a way, the book has told me nothing I didn't already know, but it put it in a context of the development of US television media. The lessons it gives us are equally important for the digital media age. I see just the same forces working in social media to say "Look over here at THIS" so as to direct attention away from THAT. My one concern is that the book preaches somewhat to the converted, though by spreading the word, the message can sometimes get to new ears.

Otherwise, we shall end up in the world of 'Fahrenheit 451'; and occasionally, I see the underlying ideology of that world - "books are dangerous because they make you feel your own reactions to what you see, rather than what you are required to feel and think' - trying very hard to break through into our reality. show less

Distraction & Media
Postman’s warnings from over 30 years ago seem even more relevant today. He predicted that society would succumb not to censorship but to distraction. The current media landscape proves him right, as viral trends and 24-hour news cycles overshadow critical issues.

Take the ongoing climate crisis, for example. Discussions about long-term solutions often take a backseat to fleeting controversies or celebrity-driven headlines. During the COVID-19 pandemic, essential public health messages competed with sensationalized political conflicts, creating confusion and mistrust. Audiences struggled to separate credible information from spin and fragmented messaging, eroding public trust.

Postman also warned that distraction show more could be as dangerous as suppression. Today, our media environment prioritizes immediacy over accuracy, leaving audiences overwhelmed and under-informed. show less