Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

"Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials." -Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In the Age of Showbusiness by Neil Postman is a book outside my usual reading patterns, but, I am glad to say I enjoyed this book, and can even call it an eye-opener, a paradigm shifter, and even among the most compelling arguments I've ever read to think carefully and cautiously about the direction our culture is headed. If you are a Cinema Media Arts major, a Business Marketing major, a Theater Arts major, a History major, or just a person that wants to think about how media affects us, this book is a mandatory read. Neil Postman argues that the things we love: technology, television, radio, computers, and the internet, all things we are entertained by, have and will turn our society into a vacuum of "absurdity" and "irrelevance" if they go unchecked. "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." If you don't agree, consider these basic questions: When was the last time you had a "deep" conversation? How often do you discuss "ideas" as opposed to "trivialities" with your friends? Does "public discourse" (conversations) seem more emotion-based or logic-based? Why in the world is this happening, because, historically speaking, this is not normal. "The Medium Is The Message" If you've ever listened to Pink Floyd's Amused To Death, or better yet, Switchfoot's Selling The News, both of those songs are based off of this book, showing the importance of this book, at least to modern alternative and rock music bands. Both these songs mention the phrase: "The medium is the message". In other words, the medium (tool) that our culture uses to communicate (Newspapers or TV) with ourselves and with each other will determine the content and quality of the message (of what is being communicated). In short, the form of communication determines the content and quality of what is being communicated. There are largely three cultural mediums that cultures have used to communicate, 1.) speech-centered (think B.C. when the printing press wasn't around and all people could do was tell stories and communicate by word of mouth), 2.) print-centered (think books, print newspapers, pamphlets, etc.), and 3.) image-centered (think televisions, the internet, and magazines...) A Monumental Shift In our age, we are experiencing a monumental shift in "mediums" of communication, and as the phrase goes, the "message" is being changed as well. The "Age of Exposition" as Postman calls it, which was America from it's conception to the 1960′s, was marked by a national fervor to read books. The "Age of Show-business" as Postman calls it, is marked by a national fervor to watch images on a screen. Consider the act of reading, how it encourages "rationality" and how confronting a page of symbols requires a person to "understand". It demands solemn response rather than impulsive reaction. This is so, mainly because, "to engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and over-generalizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another..." Reading forms your mind like a potter forms clay, into a logical, reasoning, discerning, deducing, powerful machine. In the America of the 1800′s people would listen to political speeches, such as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates which lasted for seven hours at time, just for fun, and it wasn't uncommon to find a crowd of people surrounding a person giving an intellectual oration on a dead tree stump. Lecture halls spanned the 50 states where throngs of people would line up and pay money, sometimes upwards of $200 to hear public intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, for hours, and they did that just like we watch movies at a theater today. Clearly our intention-span has diminished a great deal, and our focus has turned from intellectuality to entertainment, almost 180 degrees. The TV The introduction of the TV has affected the minds and hearts of our culture greatly. Consider the difference between watching TV and reading a book, how watching short snippets of presentations, where the hook comes around and around to entice our emotions, while reading demands sitting for long periods of time, where the author means everything he says and is appealing to our logic and reason. TV pulls us from the past to a perpetual present where it sells you each second you're watching by "appealing to your passions", reading pulls us from the present to the wide scope of history, past, present, and future and sells us not with passions but with sound arguments and logical appeals. The abdication of the second means a culture largely driven by emotions, passions, and enticing images rather than sound arguments, logic, and careful reasoning. "With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present." Christianity What really caught my interest was Postman's analysis of the affect of Television on religion, particularly Christianity. The Christian Revivals of the early days of America were headed by religious intellectual giants like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, but the religious Revivals of today are led by religious show entertainers with shallow doctrines and emotional appeals. "It would be a serious mistake to think of Billy Graham or any other television revivalist as a latter-day Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney. Edwards was one of the most brilliant and creative minds ever produced by America. His contribution to aesthetic theory was almost as important as his contribution to theology. His interests were mostly academic; he spent long hours each day in his study. He did not speak to his audiences extemporaneously. He read his sermons, which were tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions of theological doctrine...religious thought and institutions in America were dominated by an austere, learned, and intellectual form of discourse that is largely absent from religious life today." "I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether." Too Much News Are you tired of reading the news? I am, and I believe Postman is absolutely correct in his analysis that the advent of the telegraph made everything relevant or irrelevant into "news", whether it be Snoop Dog changing his name to Snoop Lion, the reoccurring event that some new celebrity insanity has shaved her head, or the ridiculous name of the baby of some movie actress marriage that only lasts for a year. All news is news whether it is irrelevant to us or not. "...most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action." What Can We Do? The inevitable question is: What can we do to put a stop to this degeneration of culture? The answer is simple: Think! This involves actually reading books, and teaching yourself to analyze rather than just accepting TV. You cannot get by today without reading good books. Reading is the process and practice of ordering, analyzing, discerning, categorizing, and reasoning and you cannot be an intelligent person if you do not have a healthy intake of good challenging books. "But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple." Is This Just Culture Whining? One possible objection to reading this book is: isn't this just another person whining about the ills of society and banging their cup against the ground in objection? Fair enough, I asked the same question when reading this book, several times. Consider how we are adamantly opposed to external slavery as a nation. We broke away from tyranny from the start and we have been a nation of "freedom" and "liberty" ever since. It is not culture whining to decry an externally caused force of tyranny. This is the same tyrrany all the same, it is just disguised as an internal form of slavery, where our desires control us, and our own passions turn our culture into slaves of our own trivialities. "Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?"

In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published a book called Common Sense: The Origin and Design of Government. It sold 100,000 copies in the first two months. Today, a book would have to sell 11,000,000 copies to match the proportion of the population that Paine’s book reached. Common Sense went on to print somewhere between 300,000-400,000 copies, equivalent to somewhere between 33,000,000-44,000,000 people today. As Postman notes in Amusing Ourselves to Death, the “only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Superbowl.” In the mid 1800s, Abraham Lincoln and one of his political adversaries (Stephen A. Douglas) used to have public debates that lasted hours. Each participant would get a minimum of an hour of speaking time before the other rose for a rebuttal, and debates could often last upwards of 4 hours. What is even more remarkable is that the audience of regular common people was rapt with attention for the entire affair. Today, politicians are given 1 minute to give an opinion on a major issue and their opponent is expected to keep their rebuttal to 30 seconds. So, there is a definitive difference in the mainstream intelligence of people from our past in comparison to people today. How did this come to be? Postman posits that it is due to the rise of television as our main source of information gathering. In the 17th and 18th centuries ideas were shared via writing (and if you go back father, to the days of humanity before writing and reading were wide-spread, when ideas were only shared orally, the scholars and politicians of the day were those select men with a knack for oratorical skills.) Postman notes how the first fifteen presidents of the United States most likely wouldn’t have been recognized by their citizens on the street, yet those same citizens could have identified them by their latest speech or piece of distributed writing. Today, things are quite different. Postman wrote this book in the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan was president—a man who was previously a big time Hollywood actor in the 1960s and built a national reputation as someone on the silver screen. Even more recently we endured the presidency of Donald Trump, the former host of a reality television series. Was Donald Trump a good politician? The debate is still out. Is he entertaining? Absolutely—he is the most entertaining politician we have ever had in the age of television and I personally am not surprised at all that he is the most popular politician in the United States right now. The core argument of Postman’s book is not only that television changed how we receive information, but it changed our entire relationship to information on an epistemological level. Whereas writing is geared towards conceptual thinking, sequential order, careful reasoning, objectivity, and a delayed response, television is meant for entertainment. Television, with its constantly moving pictures and engaging sound effects, is meant to be amusing. When we indulge in TV for entertainment’s sake, sinking into the couch after a hard day’s work to watch our favorite half hour comedy, that is not the TV that Postman is talking about. The TV that has decimated attention spans and amused us to a breaking point is the TV that has infiltrated our religions, our politics, and our education systems. “As a television show, and a good one,” Postman writes, “Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.” With television’s incorporation of the news cycle, our ways of learning about the world are also stunted. We get a story about the Middle East, and then a minute later we’re hearing about gridlock in the Senate, quickly followed by a story about a dog riding a crocodile in Florida. These are all entertaining stories to be sure, but what do they all have in common? For 99% of us, they have no impact on our daily lives. Do I wish there was less violence in the Middle East? Of course. What can I actually do about it? Essentially nothing. With all the graphic images and sounds coming out of the television screen, however, it is incredibly engaging and I can’t look away! Television is designed to make everything it touches entertaining, and it has infiltrated our culture so much so that with the advancement of the internet and social media, the trends in this book have only exacerbated. “The form in which ideas are expressed affects what those idea will be,” Postman writes, and I couldn’t agree more. We the people now expect everything in life, whether it be news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion, etc., to entertain us. If it doesn’t, we don’t want it. Personally, I believe that our culture would benefit tremendously from a return to typography—a large part of the reason why I started reading and writing book reviews in the first place. Books are where real education lies, and in my opinion a better education is the way towards a better future. The internet has recently made huge swaths of information readily available (thanks Wikipedia!) so we now must take focus from what we are learning and return focus to how we go about learning it.

Whether we like to admit it or not, technology has made its way into our lives and we will never be the same again. Every human being sees this phrase with eyes of either positivity or negativity. “Amusing Ourselves to Death” addresses the progression of typography to television and how these mediums have influenced our media, politics, and news intake. Neil Postman’s 1985 perspective on the reshaping of our culture is insightful, bold, and brutally honest. Postman’s writing might seem offensive to some, but in reality, he is striving to telling it as it is. He identifies that we as a culture thrive off of the desire to be entertained. The way we communicate reflects such desires. On page 13 Postman writes: “What I mean to point out here is that the introduction into a culture of a technique such as writing or a clock is not merely an extension of man’s power to bind time but a transformation of his way of thinking-and, of course, of the content of his culture.” Every detail of our lives is a product of the way we progressively think and respond. He then moves on to what he calls “Media as Epistemology,” referring to the ways we use media to gain or interpret knowledge. He references Frye, Jesus, and Socrates as influential figures who have influenced our understanding of truth. Postman speaks very metaphorically throughout his text, which for some, might make him hard to follow. The book doesn’t jump straight into a narrative about television, as the title might suggest. Postman takes about half the book to build up to those thoughts and instead starts out the early chapters with the original uses of the printed word. The slow progression to his main point seems long, but in a lot of ways crucial to the point he is trying to make. An enjoyable result of this book is that instead of simply bashing an entire aspect of our culture, he describes it in detail and points out factual components from beginning to end. From the Age of Exposition to the Age of Show Business, Postman describes the evolution between these stages with great quantities of truth. Weaved throughout his writings, Postman offers warnings and awareness that he hopes for the reader to grasp and understand. On page 113 Postman states: “It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides.” These kind of statements point at the weaknesses of media’s role in our society. Postman frequently uses these type of comments to drive his point home. With all of that being said, Postman's statements were truthful, but I felt that the book aired more on the side of negativity. I would have liked to hear him touch on the different positive products of electronics and the impacting changes technology has made on our culture as well. Laced with personal bias I think it’s beneficial for Postman to make us more aware, I’m just not the most supportive of the way he goes about doing it.

I was only recently made aware of this book but the content of it seems more relevant than ever. Written in a time in which television was increasingly becoming the dominant medium of communication, Neil Postman wrote about the dangers of assuming the medium was independent of the depth of discourse and in particular how television and entertainment obsession has come at the expense of informedness of the public. Despite this resonating to many as it was written 40 years ago, its applicability to the meme era sees all the more relevant as we stoop to new lows on having our technology cater to our shortest term attention spans. The book starts with highlighting the style of discourse of 19th century in the United States as proxied by the Lincoln debates. In particular the author highlights the nature of debate was based on the style of the written word and that the written word is a much more thoughtful and deliberate style than the spoken word given its permanence. This is probably the most important point in that the style of discourse affects the content of that discourse and the age of entertainment has debased the content. The author, speaking in his time, highlights that physical attractiveness was becoming the sole determinant of whether a politician would win, argued that television was changing debate and discourse to a culture of entertainment. This was then likened to a slow migration to a dystopian America closer to Brave New World despite the times in which 1984 was the larger concern in the midst of the Cold War. The author then expands on the ways in which television was creating an oversaturation of content with an underserving of meaning. He highlighted how the 24/7 news cycle provided people with information but no real context leading people with the false impression that they are informed despite having little dependable knowledge. It would seem today such phenomenon are getting worse in which technology at ones fingertips substitutes for having a memory of facts and figures that form an independent world view. The author goes on to highlight that education on TV is narrowly being applauded for all the wrong reasons, namely that the subjects are chosen for TV rather than TV is a preferred medium for education. Reviewing the book is a bit strange as the value of it lies in its observations on the culture of communication and debate rather than its observations on the time. For those observations of how discourse is affected by our mediums of exchange I believe the author has highlighted something critical that we have completely lost control over. As our mediums of exchange have coincided with more and more fractured politics and tribalism and despite many's awareness of the coincidence, we do nothing about impeding the technology's unintended consequences. That foreign policy is seemingly done on Twitter is not an evolution but a dystopian reality we now live in. The reasons for all of this are more complex than what the book could have ever foreseen but I am a believer that part of the reason stems from the observations of this book.

Written in 1985, this book has maintained its place as one of the foremost critiques of the effects of television on western society. Postman was a scholar with acute perception. To read him is to wish you had sat in his classroom. For impatient types who tend to flip past the Roman numerals: don't skip the short foreword. It offers an important juxtaposition of Huxley with Orwell and reveals the social prophetic motif which frames Postman's subsequent observations on our decline. Many readers will struggle with unfamiliar terms with the first couple chapters. But hang in there. Chapter three begins a fascinating account of a time when books and reading dominated the attention of average Americans, when boys literally walked one hand on the plow and a book in the other, when we set the world standard for literacy, when ADD was a word and not an acronym, and when common men grappled over grand ideas such that Tocqueville could declare, "An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into dissertation." Those were the days of the printed word. That was typographic America, as Postman reminisces. Then came the telegraph, the grandfather of the television, touted for its promise to permit conversation between Maine and Texas. It would make "one neighborhood of the whole country." But could the technology be restrained? Could it be resisted even when there was nothing in Maine that was pressing and significant enough to justify distracting Texans from their daily work? Would the telegraph not merely permit conversation between Maine and Texas, but demand it? Postman chronicles how telegraphy and photography primed us for the age of television. Most people at the mention of the "age of television," having neither experienced nor learned much of typographic America, would not associate it with the demise of serious, rational exchange. They imagine TV to be yet another tool for serious discourse. Postman insists that TV, by its nature, does not and cannot allow for such a thing. This would not pose much of a problem if television limited itself to the realm of entertainment- if it steered clear of politics, news, religion, and education. As we all know, it didn't. Rather, TV swallowed everything and became its own epistemology. Therefore, that which permits no complexity and no abstraction, which can only fragment and flash partial accounts in short segments became our chief means of thought formation. It's not merely that we would become mentally malnourished; it's that we wouldn't realize it. To quote the author, "I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?" (107). In this way, Postman submitted back in 1985, we were amusing ourselves to death. I think Postman gave an accurate account of our past. I also suspect if we were to travel back in time to 1985 we'd find his analysis of the present to be right on the mark. It is his predictions of the future that have fallen short. And this is where the Huxley/Orwell juxtaposition comes in. Orwell, in his classic work "1984" envisioned the loss of freedoms at the hand of Big Brother- the machinery of an impersonal, all-watching, all-controlling government. By contrast, Huxley in "Brave New World" prophesied that our demise would be of our own doing. As Postman summarizes, "Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. . . [For Orwell] people are controlled by inflicting pain. [For Huxley] 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." Clearly, Postman believed that Huxley had it right. He believed that through excessive entertainment pushing out the possibility of serious subjects receiving the serious reflection they deserve, we were imploding. Huxley may have had Orwell on the ropes in 1985. But now, we see they are both winners. Brave New World is ushering in 1984. There cannot sit long a lobotomized nation without a tyrant to rule over it any more than a pile of fresh meat can go unnoticed by a famished lion. What happens when a drunk man with Ben Franklins half hanging from every pocket stumbles through a crowd? Having amused ourselves into a defenseless stupor, we begged for Big Brother. And we got him. Postman declared Orwell dead before checking his pulse. One final criticism should be made. I wondered throughout the book what Postman's remedy would be. Not until the final pages did I discover the one an only sliver of hope against death by amusement: Education (insert 30-second pause for laughter). He states, "No medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are." But, what if the users understand and don't care? What if they are jaded by sin into perfect indifference? Contra Postman, I submit our only hope against death by amusement is repentance and faith in Jesus Christ.

It seems unlikely that a book labeled "Current Affairs" could have a shelf life of more than a few years. It seems preposterous that a book dealing with television and referring to Dallas and Dynasty could have anything to see twenty two years after being published. Yet Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, now in it's "20th Anniversary Edition" continues to be read and studied and to hold influence. Even today it is used as required reading in many high school and college level courses. Though written by a man who made no claim to Christianity, few modern books written by an unbeliever have been more widely read and quoted by Christians. It truly is a remarkable little book. Postman had that rarely quality of being able to see behind a fad, behind what was late and great. He saw the significance of the rise of the image and the fall of the word, the rise of amusement and the decline of discourse. He saw that television would soon saturate every area of our lives and taint the way we understand politics, religion, education and every other area of importance. As we now transition from a television-based culture to a computer-based culture the image remains central. Perhaps we have already amused ourselves past the point of no easy return. Television is remarkably effective at doing what it does best--entertaining. Postman had no argument with television is a tool of entertainment. In fact, the best things on television are its junk and no one is seriously threatened by this. Where television fails is in attempting to do the more serious work that has traditionally been carried by the written word. Postman makes it his goal in this book to make the epistemology of television visible, demonstrating that television's way of knowing is hostile to typography's way of knowing, and not only that, but it is inferior to it. "Serious television" is a contradiction in terms for television speaks only in the voice of entertainment, never of serious, weighty, discourse--the kind of discourse that is essential to politics, religion and education. Television's influence has been relentless, transforming our culture so that every area is now considered a venue for entertainment. Electronic media, led by television but being superseded by the computer, has changed the way we view the world and the way we carry on any kind of public discourse. Gone are the days when content was of overwhelming importance. Instead we deal with sound bites, with discordant images torn from any kind of context, and with style when in former days we relied on substance. Politicians win and lose election campaigns not on the basis of what they say, but on the basis of how they look when they say it. Throughout the book is an interesting interplay between Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. In the latter an oppressive regime dominates the world while in the former the people allow themselves to be overcome by levity, by entertainment and by pleasure so that they have no need of an oppressive regime. They were controlled by their amusements. Huxley, Postman argues, had it right. And I would tend to agree. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a good read, a disturbing read, a thought-provoking read and, dare I say it, a must-read. It deserves its status as a classic and, though already two decades out of date, it is as timely as ever.

Neil Postman writes this book in historical and chronological order, to make known his opinion about the way we gain knowledge and learn. Postman’s position is that our learning and knowledge has significantly deteriorated over time and ultimately by the invention of television. His view is that we have evolved from obtaining knowledge through print and human interaction into gaining it through visual entertainment that requires neither reading or face to face communication which Postman sees as a detriment to our ability to truly gain knowledge. I was slow to become interested in this book, as the early chapters go in depth with a lot of historical facts and scenarios that I was unfamiliar with, but as I continued to forge through the book, it proceeded to keep my interest. Postman uses humor as well as documented studies to drive his passion for this topic to the reader. I agree with a lot of Postman’s positions in this book about television, but some of the content could be considered over the top to critics. As an educator, and parent I was particularly invested in chapter 10, “Teaching as an Amusing Activity”. Since this book was written, and even since his book Technopoly was published, video gaming among children and adults has skyrocketed to exponential proportions. I wonder if there is another book in the works regarding his view on this phenomenon?

Although there's definitely a temptation for us to amuse ourselves to death with things that have always had the intent of amusement (sitcoms, dramas, sci-fi, fantasy, etc), Neil Postman has nothing bad to say about "junk television" (as it's called in the introduction). Rather, his very compelling argument is that we're turning into a society that will amuse itself to death because our capacity to comprehend and act on things is transforming into one that only operates on amusement itself. In other words, it's not that we make things for the sake of amusement that will hurt us, it's that we now make everything - even things that are not meant to be amusing - into a venue of entertainment. While originally published in 1985, I sincerely think this book is just as relevant today (in the age of Google, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter) if not even more so than when it was first penned. Postman takes the reader through the history of our mediums of communication and shows (and I mean, really shows from history) that when our culture of communication started to turn from the printed word to visual images, our capacity to think through things cogently had started to drop significantly. Our attention span has taken a terrible plummet. And even our humanity has been desensitized to a degree. In just this short book (163 pages), he shows so effectively that when we watch TV for things like news, education, religion, we're not being given news, education, or religion - we're being given entertainment (in the sense of amusement for amusement's sake). A succinct summary from his son in the introduction puts it well: "Silence has been replaced by background noise. ... [He did not] fear TV across the board (as some thought). Junk television was fine. "The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health," he wrote. "60 Minutes, Eyewitness News, and Sesame Street are" (ix, xv). The whole time reading through this, I couldn't help but to think of how many more mediums have been affected by this same thing since 1985. And it's very difficult to number them. And it's very hard not to see the whole realm of news, politics, education, and even many churches truly living out what he saw so long ago. Throughout the book he contrasts the two novels of Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and 1984, by George Orwell. Whereas 1984 predicts a world governed by coercion from the state, Brave New World predicts a world governed by hedonism. Or, as Postman put it: "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" (xx). And Postman does a very great job of demonstrating that possibility. Regardless of your own conclusions at the end of the book (I know I have some of my own), I do think it would be nearly impossible to read this and not be affected in how you view TV or the internet, or all sorts of other avenues of communication. And while I don't think Neil Postman was a Christian (in the Biblical sense of the term), I have no hesitation recommending this very thoughtful work on the evaluation of our culture. Even though it was published almost 30 years ago, it's very applicable even today.