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Product Details
Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books; 20 Anv edition (December 27, 2005)
Written in 1985, this book has maintained its place as one of the foremost critiques of the effects of television on western society. Postman was a scholar with acute perception. To read him is to wish you had sat in his classroom. For impatient types who tend to flip past the Roman numerals: don't skip the short foreword. It offers an important juxtaposition of Huxley with Orwell and reveals the social prophetic motif which frames Postman's subsequent observations on our decline.
Many readers will struggle with unfamiliar terms with the first couple chapters. But hang in there. Chapter three begins a fascinating account of a time when books and reading dominated the attention of average Americans, when boys literally walked one hand on the plow and a book in the other, when we set the world standard for literacy, when ADD was a word and not an acronym, and when common men grappled over grand ideas such that Tocqueville could declare, "An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into dissertation." Those were the days of the printed word. That was typographic America, as Postman reminisces. Then came the telegraph, the grandfather of the television, touted for its promise to permit conversation between Maine and Texas. It would make "one neighborhood of the whole country." But could the technology be restrained? Could it be resisted even when there was nothing in Maine that was pressing and significant enough to justify distracting Texans from their daily work? Would the telegraph not merely permit conversation between Maine and Texas, but demand it? Postman chronicles how telegraphy and photography primed us for the age of television.Read more ›
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Postman wrote this book in 1985, and he was way ahead of his time!
His primary criticism of the "Age of Show Business" is that all discussion, debate, and learning has been subjugated to a 30-second spot. No one has time for lengthy discussions or delving into the depths of difficult discussions or learning. You can't argue that he was spot on in much of his criticism. We don't even like phone calls anymore because they require too much commitment and too much time. We've defaulted to text messages.
While I read the book I kept thinking of his points in terms of our politics and our news coverage. What is "outrageous" or "epic" only remains so for about 24-48 hours until something else comes along. If you are a politician who gets "caught" by the media in something negative, your best hope is for something else to grab the spotlight quickly. The arguments in the political arena these days are only a millimeter deep - no one wants to spend the time and energy to do the hard work of working through an issue completely. You get the point and it was Postman's point: everything has to fit into a 30-second spot, and nothing is related - everything is independent of everything else. Of course, that's not reality, but that's the reality that we've created.
Postman bases much of his discussion on a comparison between the predictions of Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World," both written over 70 years ago. He believes that Orwell was wrong in the sense that he saw the control of a culture by a totalitarian and big brother government. Huxley's point was that culture would be controlled, not by an exterior force, but voluntarily through conditioning and psychological manipulation.Read more ›
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"Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials." -Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In the Age of Showbusiness by Neil Postman is a book outside my usual reading patterns, but, I am glad to say I enjoyed this book, and can even call it an eye-opener, a paradigm shifter, and even among the most compelling arguments I've ever read to think carefully and cautiously about the direction our culture is headed. If you are a Cinema Media Arts major, a Business Marketing major, a Theater Arts major, a History major, or just a person that wants to think about how media affects us, this book is a mandatory read.
Neil Postman argues that the things we love: technology, television, radio, computers, and the internet, all things we are entertained by, have and will turn our society into a vacuum of "absurdity" and "irrelevance" if they go unchecked.
"Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."
If you don't agree, consider these basic questions: When was the last time you had a "deep" conversation? How often do you discuss "ideas" as opposed to "trivialities" with your friends? Does "public discourse" (conversations) seem more emotion-based or logic-based? Why in the world is this happening, because, historically speaking, this is not normal.Read more ›
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