Paeans to the citizen-wide empowerment of the typographic, pre-television age praise the attention span of Civil War audiences, glossing over the actual fact of the Civil War, both World Wars, slavery, Jim Crow, and most of America’s more famous social atrocities. The contribution of television to such definitely citizen-driven changes as the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam and Iraq protests, the environmental movement, and even the end of the Cold War deserve discussion in any examination of media and politics. But anyone choosing to utilize one of the virtues Postman attributes to books might well pause to consider the place of television in social movements of the late twentieth century. Postman presents all of this in an alarming tone, insisting that the Show Business age has led to growing political apathy and information overload, and a less empowered public. Instead, there are anecdotes about televised debates resulting in cosmetically powered elections, and largely philosophical arguments about whether television redefines religion. Such evidence arguably exists, but it is not examined. Postman provides little in the way of real-world evidence that television has damaged America’s body politic. But in giving credence only to those studies which bolster his argument and dismissing all others, Postman proves nothing other than that television does have some effect on viewers, which he considers negative.Īnd this is perhaps the greatest weakness of Amusing Ourselves To Death. Part of the problem is simply that Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, and serious studies on information issues were fewer and less developed than today. When he claims that studies show televised information is quickly forgotten and then admits offhandedly that other studies disagree, or argues that Sesame Street doesn’t teach children numbers and letters, and that if it does that’s irrelevant, his obvious disinclination towards television comes through. It’s clear that Postman himself doesn’t like or trust televised information, and the bias shows in his choice of studies and anecdotes. Part of the problem is that Postman loses his objectivity when discussing the ramifications of television. Unfortunately, this, the book’s central thesis, is less than persuasive. This leads naturally to the second and central point of Postman’s argument, that the changes in public behavior spurred by television have been detrimental to American society. Postman presents a wide array of evidence, anecdotal and statistical, to show that information from television is processed in different ways from information presented in text -what he names “the typographic mind”-and personal conversations. The first, that television has changed the way Americans think and react to events, is persuasive and well argued. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death examines the effect of television on American society, with two main conclusions. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business - book reviewĪmusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business "A brilliant, powerful, and important book. It is also a blueprint for regaining control of our media, so that they can serve our highest goals. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. Now, with television joined by more sophisticated electronic media-from the Internet to cell phones to DVDs-it has taken on even greater significance. It's unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman." - CNN Originally published in 1985, Neil Postman's groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century. What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? As our world begins to look more and more like Orwell's 1984, Neil's Postman's essential guide to the modern media is more relevant than ever.
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