"Amusing Ourselves to Death" is an amazingly written and well-argued book. As Postman notes: In the Victorian Era (mid-late 1800s), novelist Charles Dickens had as much fame as The Beatles in 1960, Michael Jackson in 1980, or Brad Pitt in 2014. The farm boy in the late 1700s carried a pamphlet of Thomas Paine's writings in his back pocket. Today, school-children carry iphones with pictures of Eminem (boy) or Taylor Swift (girl). In the mid-1800s, Abraham Lincoln and Stephan A. Douglas debated in public FOR HOURS on the dire issues of their time. Today, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have bite-sized debates where one side speaks for 1 minute and the other side gets a 30-second rebuttal.
.
Clearly, the people then were different from the people now in terms of mainstream intelligence. The reason, Postman argues, is that the people in Dickens' era were children of "The Age of Typography," and the people today (us) are the children of "The Age of Show Business," or "The Age of Television." Reading was life to people in the older days; watching television is life to us now. And television, however entertaining, cannot be anything but sheer junk because it works through images, sensationalism, and emotional gratification. Writing, on the other hand, requires patience, detachment, memory, and reason. The result is that we are dumber than our ancestors. Incredulous? Pick up the book and let Postman prove it to you.
.
This book was written in 1985, but don't be fooled; it still wields enormous relevance today -- The chapter titled, "Peek-a-Boo-World" as well as the "Information-to-action-ratio" theory outlined in it are particularly pertinent regarding the modern-day use of the internet, especially with portable laptops, tablets, and cellphones. With those gadgets, we have become, in short, a nation buried in triviality, as Postman predicted. Furthermore, television viewership today has not decreased with the rise of the internet, iphones, and such. On the contrary, studies show that we still watch as much television as before, despite the alarmingly rising rate of electronic use. In this book, Postman focuses on politics, religion, education, and the news. These, he says, are serious topics that are downgraded to mere amusement because television, by design, works by making everything amusing. In effect, we come to expect everything in life to be entertaining when, in actuality, some things must be endured. Again, I urge you to read this book carefully. I've read it four times. It's ideas have allowed me to wean myself away from television and on to typography. Let it have the same effect on you.
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Flip to back Flip to front
Follow the Author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
| Price | New from | Used from |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
|
Audio CD, Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $19.71 | — |
Great on Kindle
Great Experience. Great Value.
Putting our best book forward
Each Great on Kindle book offers a great reading experience, at a better value than print to keep your wallet happy.
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Get the free Kindle app: 
Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book.
Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
Popular Highlights in this book
Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.Highlighted by 2,144 Kindle readers- And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.Highlighted by 1,990 Kindle readers
- We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.Highlighted by 1,888 Kindle readers
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Customer reviews
literature teaches, television entertains
Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2021
In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published a book called Common Sense: The Origin and Design of Government. It sold 100,000 copies in the first two months. Today, a book would have to sell 11,000,000 copies to match the proportion of the population that Paine’s book reached. Common Sense went on to print somewhere between 300,000-400,000 copies, equivalent to somewhere between 33,000,000-44,000,000 people today. As Postman notes in Amusing Ourselves to Death, the “only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Superbowl.”In the mid 1800s, Abraham Lincoln and one of his political adversaries (Stephen A. Douglas) used to have public debates that lasted hours. Each participant would get a minimum of an hour of speaking time before the other rose for a rebuttal, and debates could often last upwards of 4 hours. What is even more remarkable is that the audience of regular common people was rapt with attention for the entire affair. Today, politicians are given 1 minute to give an opinion on a major issue and their opponent is expected to keep their rebuttal to 30 seconds.So, there is a definitive difference in the mainstream intelligence of people from our past in comparison to people today. How did this come to be? Postman posits that it is due to the rise of television as our main source of information gathering. In the 17th and 18th centuries ideas were shared via writing (and if you go back father, to the days of humanity before writing and reading were wide-spread, when ideas were only shared orally, the scholars and politicians of the day were those select men with a knack for oratorical skills.) Postman notes how the first fifteen presidents of the United States most likely wouldn’t have been recognized by their citizens on the street, yet those same citizens could have identified them by their latest speech or piece of distributed writing. Today, things are quite different. Postman wrote this book in the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan was president—a man who was previously a big time Hollywood actor in the 1960s and built a national reputation as someone on the silver screen. Even more recently we endured the presidency of Donald Trump, the former host of a reality television series. Was Donald Trump a good politician? The debate is still out. Is he entertaining? Absolutely—he is the most entertaining politician we have ever had in the age of television and I personally am not surprised at all that he is the most popular politician in the United States right now.The core argument of Postman’s book is not only that television changed how we receive information, but it changed our entire relationship to information on an epistemological level. Whereas writing is geared towards conceptual thinking, sequential order, careful reasoning, objectivity, and a delayed response, television is meant for entertainment. Television, with its constantly moving pictures and engaging sound effects, is meant to be amusing. When we indulge in TV for entertainment’s sake, sinking into the couch after a hard day’s work to watch our favorite half hour comedy, that is not the TV that Postman is talking about. The TV that has decimated attention spans and amused us to a breaking point is the TV that has infiltrated our religions, our politics, and our education systems. “As a television show, and a good one,” Postman writes, “Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.”With television’s incorporation of the news cycle, our ways of learning about the world are also stunted. We get a story about the Middle East, and then a minute later we’re hearing about gridlock in the Senate, quickly followed by a story about a dog riding a crocodile in Florida. These are all entertaining stories to be sure, but what do they all have in common? For 99% of us, they have no impact on our daily lives. Do I wish there was less violence in the Middle East? Of course. What can I actually do about it? Essentially nothing. With all the graphic images and sounds coming out of the television screen, however, it is incredibly engaging and I can’t look away!Television is designed to make everything it touches entertaining, and it has infiltrated our culture so much so that with the advancement of the internet and social media, the trends in this book have only exacerbated. “The form in which ideas are expressed affects what those idea will be,” Postman writes, and I couldn’t agree more. We the people now expect everything in life, whether it be news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion, etc., to entertain us. If it doesn’t, we don’t want it. Personally, I believe that our culture would benefit tremendously from a return to typography—a large part of the reason why I started reading and writing book reviews in the first place. Books are where real education lies, and in my opinion a better education is the way towards a better future. The internet has recently made huge swaths of information readily available (thanks Wikipedia!) so we now must take focus from what we are learning and return focus to how we go about learning it.
Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2021
Images in this review
Top reviews from other countries
Paolo
How the new medias are determining today's society and reality
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2014Verified Purchase
Mike S
Alarming analysis of Things that have Actually Come.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 11, 2019Verified Purchase
Stuart Brown
Mystic Meg stuff!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 29, 2017Verified Purchase
Andy H
Still an interesting book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 26, 2017Verified Purchase
Tony Durrant
Book was promptly sent. Thank you.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 23, 2018Verified Purchase
