Book Review
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman (1931 – 2003)
Penguin Books 1985
About the Author
"For the last third of the twentieth century, Neil Postman was one of America’s foremost social critics and education and communications theorists, and his ideas and accessibility won him an international following. An influential and revered teacher, he was professor for more than forty years at New York University,
where he founded the renowned Media Ecology program. Blessed with an unusually far-reaching mind, he authored more than twenty books, producing major works on education (Teaching as a Subversive Activity, The End of Education), childhood (The Disappearance of Childhood), language (Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk), news (How to Watch TV News, with Steve Powers) and technology’s impact on culture (Technopoly). Amusing Ourselves to Death remains his most reverberating and widely read book, translated into more than a dozen languages. He was educated at the State University of New York at Fredonia and Columbia University. He died in October 2003, at the age of seventy-two."
About the Book
Introduction
Foreword
Part I.
Chapter 1. - The Medium Is the Metaphor
Chapter 2. - Media as Epistemology
Chapter 3. - Typographic America
Chapter 4. - The Typographic Mind
Chapter 5. - The Peek-a-Boo World
Part II.
Chapter 6. - The Age of Show Business
Chapter 7. - “Now ... This”
Chapter 8. - Shuffle Off to Bethlehem
Chapter 9. - Reach Out and Elect Someone
Chapter 10. - Teaching as an Amusing Activity
Chapter 11. - The Huxleyan Warning
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Endorsements
Dean Abbott in "Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman: A Review" March 23, 2015 at www.patheos.com says, "Not many books offer social critiques so trenchant they become classics. Even fewer pull off this feat in fewer than two hundred pages. Neal Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death does both. The book remains relevant thirty years after its initial publication. At the heart of its argument is the claim that television has radically altered every aspect of American life for the worse. Television, Postman claims, has changed religion, politics, and culture by rendering them little more than entertainment. Or rather, television has changed Americans by causing us to expect every aspect of life to be a source of entertainment. Postman is right about this, but he’s also right about his secondary claim. American culture has been changed, he argues, because the people who inhabit it have been changed. Television, he claims, has changed the very nature of our minds. "
Andrew Spencer, at www.ethicsandculture.com, says, "Neil Postman’s classic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business, is an assessment of the shifts in Western culture since the advent of modern communication technologies. This is the sort of book that was prophetic in its day and, although somewhat dated, still communicates significant warnings to readers now."
Ali Reda says, "Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley marked in "Brave New World Revisited", the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."
This book's popularity is demonstrated in the fact that its Amazon rank is #4 in the "Television History & Criticism" category, and is rated 4.6 out of 5 stars with 1,426 ratings.
Epilogue
We end this episode and declare "writing is revolutionary." For more than 5,000 years, the information density and format efficiency of the written record is the gold standard for information.
Let's feed our minds and nourish our imagination. Let's read.
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