Amusing Ourselves to Death

WORKING

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business." Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK / New York and Other Cities: Penguin, 1985.

On-line publisher's blurb (as of Dec. 2022):

Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman’s groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media—from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs — it has taken on even greater significance. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals.[1]

From Wikipedia entry (also Dec. 2022):

The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the quality of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.[2]

What Postman says about television is (of course) relevant for the interactive descendent of TV, the internet, especially social media and all forms of electronic media where any words must compete with images and intentional distractions. See

for Postman's seeing A. Huxley's Brave New World as more relevant for the late 20th c. than Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four;

for Postman's excellent summary and application of Lewis Mumford on clocks, in Technics and Civilization (Postman pp. 11-12; I.1, "The Medium Is the Metaphor").

++++++++++++++++ PART I

Ch. 3, "Typographic America," Ch.4, "The Typographic Mind": See for Postman's praise of literate English-speaking America, from the colonial period through the 19th c. Note especially Postman on of literary polish of higher-end theological debate in America, and of their preaching, prior to our times. 

CAUTION: When Postman discusses literacy and the love of books and learning and "book learning" in early America, he's correct for New England, New York, and the areas to the west that Yankees and such colonized; this is less true for Virginia, Appalachia, and the Deep South (see, among other works, Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America).[3] Note also the whole issue of slavery — that Postman doesn't deal with — and the brutal suppression of literacy among the enslaved. Such repression is a kind of tribute to the power of reading and writing, but a fraught one.

Ch. 5, "The Peek-a-Boo World": Changes with the telegraph and photography. (Note a somewhat odd silence: Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five appeared in 1969 and announces itself on the title page as "a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from." Postman doesn't deal in this chapter, or at all, with Vonnegut's novel.)

PART II

Ch. 6, "The Age of Show Business": Television as "a technology of images," of brief duration — 3.5 seconds for average shot — that is not only entertaining but "has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. [...] Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television" (pp. 86-87). 
 • Includes a somewhat churlish but effective critique of TV at its most serious: the showing and (non)discussion of the 20 November 1983 broadcast of The Day After[4][5] on nuclear war comes to Kansas, among other places (pp. 88-91).
 • Among other notable quotations: "The single most important thing about television is that people watch it [...]. And what they watch, and like to watch, are moving pictures — millions of them, of short duration and dynamic variety. It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; this is to say, to accommodate the values of show business" (p. 92). Cf. and somewhat contrast the 21st-c. internet as a provider of eyes (and some ears) for advertising.

Ch. 7, "'Now ... This'": TV is not responsible for the "Now ... This" movement from subject to subject, which Postman has "tried to show [...] is the offspring of the intercourse between telegraphy and photography" (p. 100). Misses Monty Python's "And now for something completely different" (from before 1971),[6] but gets and discusses in detail television's presentation of especially the news in fragments. "[...] embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason  sequence[,] and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory os Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville" (p. 105).

Important discussion of credibility in terms of performance (and of old ideas — our word — of ethos, our willingness to accept the word of the source): Television "provides a new (or possibly restores an old) definition of truth: The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. 'Credibility' here does not refer to at the past record of the teller from making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability[,] or attractiveness [...] conveyed by the actor/reporter" a test for verisimilitude, not verity or veracity (pp. 101-02). 

Presents TV news as a form of disinformation "using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing someone but which in fact leads one away from knowing. [...] when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result" (p. 107).
On public acceptance of Ronald Reagan's misstatements and more generally accepting contradictions, defined as "mutually exclusive assertions than cannot possibly both, in the same context, be true" — with the crucial issue of television news and "news of the day" omits the context (p. 109), and the demand or even just desire for continuity (p. 110). 

Penultimate point on radio being "well suited to transmission of rational, complex language" — but that was not the way it was going in the mid-1980s (pp. 112-13).  

Ch. 8, "Shuffle off to Bethlehem": Religion on television (not the reasoned, long-form discourse of Jonathan Edwards et al.). 

RDE, finishing, 4Dec22