Watching the news will never be the same after you read this book A very well-written and scary book about how television's strength (entertainment) has corrupted news content and political discourse. Starts where Orwell, Huxley, and McLuhan left off.
In spite of the serious subject, many funny parts.
Neil Postman is a prolific author and social commentator of the end of the 20th century. Over 20 books written on media, technology, and education.
Shakespeare is Full of Quotes A careless reading of "Amusing Ourselves to Death" will reveal a string of cliches about the modern era of industry and sense of participation in it: that our politicians are image-focused, "news-of-the-day" is typically useless, and our preachers and teachers are entertainers primarily. This book is hack, if only in the sense that the ideas he presents were of grave concern to Plato. Postman takes that (1) truth is given form by rhetoric, (2) which is defined by the mode of expression, (3) and although historically authors were aware of the distinction between speech, image and text, with the rapid accumulation of new forms of meda we are no longer conscious of how they shape our dialogue, (4) and via the transformation of discourse into image-driven entertainment we are losing the context of content.
If any of this sounds familiar, it is for the same reason that Shakespeare is full of quotes. His ideas have such weight that they have successfully defined the scope of media studies. But perhaps the most insidious nature of television and the Entertainment Age is its ability to package criticism of it into entertainment itself. VH1's extraordinary "I Love the 70's" took B-celebrities commenting on those who have become B-celebrities and the outlandishness extremes of entertainment. To take Postman seriously, it's to understand media studies is not merely studying what's on television, but what is television for.Desperate Networks The cover art of headless viewers watching television says it all. My only brush with the late Neil Postman came when he spoke at the university I was attending in the northwest. A breezy east coaster, he was unaware of the need to step on eggs. During the questions, one woman said, "Mr. Postman, how can we help children have self-esteem?" to which he replied, "I don't want them to have self-esteem; I want them to esteem something other than themselves."
After the stunned silence I and a few others rose and started clapping; it was very much as if life had been returned to Pepperland in Yellow Submarine. I've been clapping inwardly ever since, as when I read this book.
There are hundreds of reviews of this book, which created a stir everywhere. Everyone (except the people running TV) seems to have read it. Most readers find it smooth going. However, those who don't want to tackle the book can still wrestle with the ideas. In Postman's essay collection, Conscientious Objections, he replies to the question "Why are books so long?" with the answer that they don't have to be, and as an example gives a short version of this book.
The basic thesis is that along with George Orwell's 1984 in which civilization lapses into a dystopia (opposite of a utopia) ruled by oppression and violence, there was the opposite vision in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that society would be destroyed by indulgence in pleasure. Postman says that while you can make a good case for the first view, the second is in full swing. Now if only the desperate networks would read this book and (re)turn to making good TV.
