Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), is a controversial book by Neil Postman in which he criticized the television industry for confounding serious issues with entertainment. The book originated with Postman delivering a talk to the Frankfurt Booksellers Convention in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell's 1984 and the contemporary world.

Summary

Postman distinguished the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from the vision offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss and voluntarily sacrifice their rights. Postman sees television's entertainment value as a "soma" for the contemporary world, and he sees contemporary man surrending its rights in exchange for entertainment.

The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content," that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Rational argument, as it evolved to its prime with print typography, cannot be conveyed through medium of television because "its form excludes the content." Because of this failing and equal attempt to make it work, politics and religion get diluted, and "news of the day" is turned into a commodity, where, of course, presentation always outweights quality—all bowing down to becoming forms of entertainment, just so they "make-it". It is in this aspect that Postman begins to take a much more hostile stance on electronic media, namely television, than his predecessor Marshall McLuhan, who seemed to have mixed feelings about the nature of electronic media, but who leaned towards a positive outlook.

Postman objects to the presentation of television news with all the trappings of entertainment programming, including theme music and "talking hairdos." He also extended this problem to the arena of politics and education. He states the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication. He argues that television demeans the practice of politics, and describes how the effect of television has made politics much less about ideologies and more about image. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which indicates a complete absence of any connection between one topic and the next. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication, instead of the traditional "the end".

Postman also states that television is a poor technology for education, as it is a passive form of information transfer, incapable of providing the interaction needed to maximize learning. He draws from the ideas of the media scholar Marshall McLuhan—lovingly augmenting McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" into "the medium is the metaphor"—to describe how oral, literate, and televisual cultures value and transfer information, and how different media are therefore appropriate for different kinds of knowledge. More particularly, as is the attack of his book, is how certain media aren't good for particular kinds of knowledge, in this case rational argument cannot be sustained—not without the money to defy economic censorship—through television. Rational argument is a much more demanding process that involves complex arguments and counter-arguments. Reading, a prime example cited by Postman, is a subject of intense intellectual involvement, at once interactive and dialectical, unlike television which limits involvement to passivity. Moreover, as television is programmed for maximum ratings, its content is determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television, in its present state, cannot sustain any of the conditions needed for honest intellectual involvement and rational argument.

Given this analysis, Postman regards television as a useful entertainment medium, but denounces its use in such intellectually demanding areas as political argument, education, and the news. He also repeatedly states that the nineteenth century was the pinnacle for rational argument, truly being the Age of Reason. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed.

Amusing Ourselves to Death was translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide.

Reference

• Neil Postman. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin USA, 1985. ISBN 0670804541

See also

• Roger Waters' 1992 album "Amused to Death" was, in part, inspired by and deals with some of the same subject matter as Postman's book.