Customer Reviews

Amusing Ourselves to Death

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Neil Postman does a good job pointing out his ideas on the dangers of television and how it has changed our society and ways of life. He says it has degraded our culture, changing how we learn and educate ourselves and how we even practice religion. For example the news and politics. He explains that television shouldn't be a source for news because its only purpose is to bring us entertainment, I disagree because it seems to me that TV is one of the biggest sources we have to find out about the latest news, next to the news paper. There may be some programs whose purpose is merely entertainment (like the Jon Stewart Show) but there are also many programs whose goal is just to bring you the news. But one thing that I do agree with is how it has changed politics. It uses TV campaigning, which show the charisma and looks of the candidate, to lure in voters. It's no longer who has the better ideas, it's who has the more visual appealing campaign.

Postman's main idea in this book is how we have evolved our learning habits to television. We've come from learning from teachers through lectures which kept our brains active and made us ask questions about the subject, to reading which made us think about the material we're reading, to educational television programs which mostly make us brain dead and provide no education what so ever and purely entertainment. I do agree that most of television has no educational purpose and has dramatically influenced our learning ways that we now are hardly learning as much as people have in the past, but he has also missed those which do not fit into what he believes has no education or information. Now of days there are plenty of educational programs which do bring pure education along side with those that fit into of what he speaks of like The Jon Stewart Show and Barney.