Customer Reviews

Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Elisabeth Sifton Books)

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I had to read this book when it first was published, for a Mass Media class for my Broadcasting and Communications degree at a community college in the Catskills.
It was excellent, but as I read it, I had a notebook handy. I was an older student in the class and the older one's could appreciate the depth of the content, while the younger students simply could not grasp it. Many just "gave up" reading it.
[...]

Neil Postman studied what happens as we are taking in the learnings of life - that process has changed, for the worse. Here he laid out (among other points) the reasons TV-"learning" is inferior to print learning, and what differences they actually make.

The people who founded the USA were probably the most literate concentration of humans in the world - but what's happened with the changes in the knowledge-process since TV (even the telegraph) appeared much later?

This pioneering book makes sense of much we suspect but may not be readily able to sum up. It may overstate a point or two, but it brings powerful insight. The "dumb-down" phenom is real, and a lot bigger than we may comfortably imagine. *Consider the effects* on our people and nation.