Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Kindle Edition

"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.

Decades before screens dominated culture, Neil Postman saw how visual images distort our ability to think logically as well as the resulting cultural chaos. "In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas." We're rapidly losing this coherence, and in the process, our civilization as we know it. Others have sounded the alarm, Endangered Minds by educator Jane Healy, Phd, and more recently, Resetting Your Child's Brain by pediatric psychiatrist Victoria Dunckley, MD. We can't turn the clock back, but especially with children, we need the brain-building, abstract-to-concrete cognitive function that only the printed word provides.

This version of the book has been republished in 2006 (written in 1985) by Neil Postman. I have to admit this book is before my time, most of the famous actors, comedians, authors and TV shoes mentioned I had to look up, but the book provides a unique perspective on where our culture turns to entertainment to inform us on all types of public discourse. The book comes in 2 parts. Part 1 talks about the history of media and Postman's intentional metaphors. Part 2 goes more in depth of Postman's ideology behind television and what it does to our society. As a freshman college student I found postman's ideology highly stimulating, although I don't agree with some of his ideas. "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is a fun, intellectual read, and being printed in 1985 Postman's predictions are eerily accurate today. I bought the book from a separate amazon vendor. The booked shipped in good condition (little fold on the front cover but that I can overlook, no highlights or pen marks).

Very informative in content, even for an older book. In other words it is still relevant for today in the IPad and wifi world. I like how he takes you on the journey on the history of mediums. It is funny that I have read this book during lent and we have elected to forgo watching TV, with some minor excepts.

Postman does a wonderful job showing the power types of media have on a society. He also takes us back in history and shows how different the typed word and TV are. The type of media itself profoundly changes us apart from the content of the media.
Although it was written over 30 years ago, it is profoundly relevant for our day. We need to wake up and see how we are ruining ourselves by how we use modern media.

Love, love, love this book. Engaging and informative. And more relevant than ever in the age of the 24-hour internet news cycle.

The typographic vs telegraphic mind, questioning what is television, continuity/discontinuity, context/decontextualization, hell even acculturation and cultural imperialism are hinted here. If you want to know why civilization is spiraling out if control, start your search here.

I did not have access to television until I was ten years old and as a result I became addicted to books. I'll choose a book over television any day and don't usually watch tv unless I'm at someone else's house. This book will open your mind to facts about itself and the effects of an entertainment culture that you never even considered.