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

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 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, show more 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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

I have... a LOT of reactions to the arguments put forth in this book. Among them:
What about Mr. Rogers? *I read in an interview that he was a regular fixture on their television, and that Postman appreciated his methods.
Just wait until videogames take off (originally published in 1985, hahaha)!
Neil can't think of *any* reason to vote for an individual instead of party?
Was the advent of print an educational "crisis" or simply a pedagogical change? Plato wrote stuff down, too. *"Technopoly" treats this in greater detail.
How about the leagues of cable-cutters? Fewer ads, more "perplexing" shows than in the 70s-80s (along with the ills of social media and reality programming).
Critics should not overlook that Neil openly acknowledges that show more entertainment, especially trashy entertainment, is not evil, just easier than ever to indulge in the modern age.
What of the graphic novel? Marriage of images and text, more engaging than passive viewership - may not be Ivanhoe, but I think Neil would have to admit a lot of virtues within comics.
I think his examinations of television (and technology in general) as epistomological roadblocks are rather spot on. It's always good to think about how/why we think a certain way. show less

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

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