Amusing Ourselves to Death
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LC Class P94.P63 1985[1] | | |
Text | Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business at Internet Archive |
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Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
Postman's book has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition.[not verified in body]
Summary
Postman distinguishes the
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. Thus
Postman asserts the presentation of
Postman refers to the inability to act upon much of the so-called information from televised sources as the
Drawing on the ideas of media scholar
Postman argues that commercial television has become derivative of advertising. Moreover, modern television commercials are not "a series of testable, logically ordered assertions" rationalizing consumer decisions, but "is a drama—a mythology, if you will—of handsome people" being driven to "near ecstasy by their good fortune" of possessing advertised goods or services. "The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue" because more often than not "no claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama." Because commercial television is programmed according to ratings, its content is determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television in its present state, he says, does not satisfy the conditions for honest intellectual involvement and rational argument.
He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "
In popular culture
Roger Waters' 1992 album Amused to Death is titled after Postman's book, and is in part inspired by and deals with some of the same subject matter.[2] In The End of Education, Postman remarked that the album's reference to his work,[3][4]
...so elevated my prestige among undergraduates that I am hardly in a position to repudiate him or his kind of music. Nor do I have the inclination for any other reason. Nonetheless, the level of sensibility required to appreciate the music of Roger Waters is both different and lower than what is required to appreciate, let us say, a Chopin étude.
Postman's concept of the "information-action ratio" was referenced in the
In a 2019 interview with Kjersti Flaa, comic and actor Zach Galifianakis references Amusing Ourselves to Death with the line "you will stop hearing the term 'big brother' because we will do it to ourselves." Galifianakis employed the quotation in response to a question the interviewer asked about whether or not he uses social media, to which he replied with a denunciation of the negative effects of the internet on society in general.[6]
See also
- B-Television
- Bread and circuses
- Infotainment
- Media criticism
Similar works
- Bowling Alone
- The End of Education
- Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 1978 critique of television by Jerry Mander
- The Global Trap
- Is Google Making Us Stupid?
- Manufacturing Consent
- Network (1976), film satire of television news as entertainment
- One-Dimensional Man
- The Plug-In Drug, 1977 critique of television by Marie Winn
References
- )
- ISBN 0-7119-4109-2.
- ISBN 9780679430063.
- ^ "ATD - Neil Postman's Response". Archived from the original on 2 November 2019. Retrieved 24 March 2019.
- ^ "Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner Decodes Every Song on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino". Pitchfork. 11 May 2018. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
- ^ "ZACH GALIFIANAKIS - People Are Too Sensitive". YouTube. April 1, 2019. Retrieved September 3, 2020.
Further reading
- ISBN 0-670-80454-1.
- ISBN 0-679-75031-2.