book review: amusing ourselves to death by neil postman
06 Apr 2022
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
What are the main ideas?
- george orwell (in 1984) was wrong about the future and aldous huxley (in a brave new world) was right. orwell feared big brother as an obvious, evil, and pervasive force. that was how dictators of the past developed hegemony. huxley more accurately predicted the present in that hegemonic forces now don’t appear to be forcing anyone to do anything and the power is even more absolute. “…For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
- as our media have developed from oral, to writing, to mass print, to newspaper, to telegram, to radio, to television, we are moving towards a society in which the visual of something far exceeds the literal or even metaphorical meaning of that thing. this, and other forces that cause losses of context are moving us towards a society in which amusement matters above all else. even if the topic at hand is as important as, say, national security, if it is not able to presented to us in an entertaining way, we will not pay attention to it. this is detrimental to society because it means we cannot look at anything that is hard, nuanced, and/or doesn’t come with easy solutions.
- in order for word-based media to be effective, things have to make (rational) sense. image-based media, like television, is not subject to that same constraint. in fact, most advertising doesn’t even attempt rationality. it taps into subtle, implicit, emotional parts of us and is monstrously effective at controlling us as a result.
- it should be stunning to us that, just like the global and unfettered expansion of the computer, we collectively have spent very little energy questioning how contemporary technologies are affecting our society. even if some people are aware of the natures and limitations of new technologies, no one seems to care very much (or if they do, they aren’t able to get their caring to feel significant to very many people). we are not even teaching our children how to best use (and when to not) these technologies. that should terrify us. but mostly we’re too busy watching said technologies to think about them.
- the fact that the newsmedia covers our presidential political debates like boxing matches is a clear indicator that we have entered into a society that values entertainment more than substance… even when the substance is who will be the more effective next leader of the country.
If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?
#1. stop watching tv. #2. stop thinking about television as educational (even when shows frame themselves as such).
How would I describe the book to a friend?
this book makes an important point that i can’t overstate: our desire for entertainment above all else is leading us off a cliff. my friend, jason, says this book is basically habermas but written for a popular audience and that makes sense to me. the book is well-argued though it’s a little overdone in its extremes, biting humor, and overflowing examples. it’s one of those books that could also be a pamphlet/zine and still probably make the same point. that said, ironically, the book feels like it was written to be entertaining so that it would be read. all that aside, chapter after chapter it made me rethinking so much of the fabric of our society. every time someone recommends a tv show to me i can’t help but think about this text. what we are avoiding attending to while we are sitting passively, consuming someone else’s framing of the world (even when we agree with the framing itself)?
reminder: book review structure
words / writing / post-processing
611w / 17min / 5min