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").

++++++++++++++++

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]

RDE, finishing, 1Dec22