PDF Summary:Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman

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• What happens to us when we become infatuated with technologies?
• What are the trade-offs?
• How do technologies free us and constrain us?
• Do they build on or erode democracy: Do they make us better or worse citizens? Do they elevate political discourse? Do they make our leaders more or less accountable?
• How can we control our technologies rather than being controlled by them?

Postman doesn’t offer many solutions—he mostly leaves those up to future readers. He intends his book to be a wake-up call to first see what technology, particularly television, is doing to public life and discourse and how it’s doing it. That, in itself, was a radical proposition in 1985 and remains so today.

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• On truth: Orwell warned about a government hiding the truth; Huxley worried about a society where truth wouldn’t matter to people seeking only distraction.

This book argues that Huxley’s version of the future—a population interested only in being satisfied and entertained—is the one we are moving toward. Part 1 looks at how media define information, truth, and public discourse, while Part 2 looks at how television has redefined those things by creating a culture of entertainment.

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At the time this book was written, the U.S. president was a former movie actor, Ronald Reagan, who had observed years earlier that “Politics is just like show business.” Seeing the power of television to draw an audience, politicians began popping up in small roles on popular television shows.

Former President Richard Nixon, who believed he’d lost an election earlier in his career because of a poor make-up job, learned his lesson and years later advised Sen. Edward Kennedy to lose weight if he wanted to be a serious presidential contender.

Television journalists spent as much time as candidates on enhancing their looks for the camera. In fact, appearance or “camera appeal” was a requirement for delivering the news. Everyone, from advertisers to celebrity preachers like Billy Graham to sex expert Dr. Ruth understood the requirement of television to look good and be entertaining and uncomplicated in order to command an audience.

Form Dictates Content

Politicians of the 20th century quickly learned that the medium or form of communication dictates the message, and they accommodated themselves to television. In fact, **our forms of communication throughout history have...

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In contrast, people’s verbal remarks are seen as more casual and fleeting. Because written words are more durable, they seem more credible, accurate, and truthful.

At his trial, Socrates lost credibility (and his life) because he failed to communicate in the way a majority of his jurors defined as truthful. Socrates spoke extemporaneously and asked jurors for patience with his lack of preparation. But this contradicted the prevailing belief that polished rhetoric or oratory was an indication of truthfulness. Today, in contrast, we often think of rhetoric as shallow and pretentious.

So we have a cultural bias linking truth with certain forms of expression: what one culture may regard as authentic, another may see as trivial.

Truth and Intelligence

As a culture’s forms of expression (media) evolve—from oral to writing, printing, the telegraph, and television—its ideas of truth also evolve. Today, we contend that “seeing is believing,” but in the past, depending on the medium, we might have argued that hearing, reading, counting, or feeling was believing.

Our concept of truth is closely related to what we think of as intelligence (ability to comprehend...

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Reading was necessary to participate in public life. To the framers of the Constitution, literacy and reasoning ability were essential to self-governance. It’s why Thomas Jefferson advocated universal education, and why most states tried to ensure maturity and literacy by requiring voters to be at least 21.

Print-Centered Discourse

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, had an immense audience, selling about 400,000 copies. The equivalent in 1985 would be a book selling 24 million copies.

In terms of capturing public attention, Paine’s feat would be comparable to the Super Bowl today.

Besides pamphlets, the earliest homegrown literature took the form of a newspaper started in 1690 in Boston. Printers like Benjamin Franklin also published journals, sermons, and “broadsides” carrying dueling opinions.

In the late 18th century, a national conversation developed around the Federalist Papers (85 essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, published in 1787-1788), which were read widely.

Subscription libraries accessible to members only developed in the 1800s; “apprentices’ libraries” also developed for the working class. The _McGuffey...

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Newspapers played a role by seizing on the opportunity to obtain and publish information from far-flung places. Previously, they had focused mostly on community information relevant to local issues and decisions. But they soon began promoting non-local information received by telegraph and giving it greater prominence. Publishers rushed to back efforts to fully wire the nation.

Soon after the telegraph system spread, the Associated Press was founded in 1846 to gather information from around the world and disseminate it to everyone. Relevance had become irrelevant. Crimes, disasters, and wars, and other telegraphic content, were packaged and presented as “the news of the day.”

Commodifying Information

The telegraph and newspapers also decontextualized information and turned it into a commodity. It didn’t need to have a value to the recipient or serve any local purpose other than stirring interest or curiosity.

In oral and print-based cultures, information’s importance depended on its utility or the possibility it presented for action. You could do something with it to affect your life or community. However, **the telegraph and subsequent technologies have...

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No Business But Show Business

As print culture once influenced the way we practiced politics, religion, business, and education, television shapes our behavior in those arenas today:

• Instead of talking to each other in school, church, or at work, we entertain each other.
• Instead of exchanging ideas, we exchange images.
• Instead of being persuaded by propositions, we’re persuaded by appearance, celebrity, and commercial messages.

It’s getting harder to determine what’s show business and what isn’t. Teachers perform for students, surgeons perform and narrate surgery for television audiences, and churches “modernize” their services with music and performances.

In the Age of Television, show business or entertainment values drive every form of information exchange. To paraphrase the popular song, “There’s no business but show business.”

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The information Americans possess is really a type of disinformation. In the 1980s, disinformation referred to bits and pieces of misleading information spread by Soviet and U.S. spies, which created a false sense of knowledge. Disinformation is also a consequence of packaging news as entertainment. We know about a lot of things without knowing anything in any depth.

However, there’s a worse prospect than lacking good information—it’s no longer even knowing what it means to be well-informed. Ignorance can be remedied—unless people mistake it for knowledge.

Accustomed to Incoherence

Another problem when news and information are presented in discontinuous fragments is that people become accustomed to incoherence. This makes it even harder to assess truth.

Many of Reagan’s misstatements were contradictions—he made assertions that were mutually exclusive—that is, two statements couldn’t both be true in the same context. However, he got away with some contradictions (as other politicians also do) when his statements were reported as isolated fragments and not compared to each other. When statements are presented without context, contradictions disappear.

**We’re so...

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1) The sacred environment of a church can’t be duplicated on television. Churches by design create an atmosphere conducive for enacting religious rituals. Services can be performed outside, but the environment of a church must be recreated with symbols and sacred objects. The environment prompts people to behave in certain ways in church, which can’t be achieved at home in front of a television. In addition, the church atmosphere helps create a state of mind receptive to a religious experience; again, this doesn’t happen with television.

2) Television is associated in people’s minds with secularism, or other events and entertainment. Viewers are constantly aware of the option to switch channels to another event. Religious programs are bookended with secular programming and commercials—so television’s main message of non-stop entertainment speaks louder than religion’s message of reflection.

Television preachers realize this and design their shows to attract audiences, with lavish sets, images, and even secular actors who endorse them.

Offering People What They Want

Television’s bias toward satisfying an audience means that TV preachers have to go beyond...

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Politicians are celebrities and sources of entertainment. In fact, celebrity has superseded political party in influencing our choice of candidates. Their television images are aimed at making us feel better rather than telling us why they would do the better job.

As the television commercial is substance-free so it can work on an emotional level, “image politics” is also free of context, ideology, and information.

Television Replaces History

Television has changed our relationship with our own history. History has context; television creates an incoherent present.

Orwell believed an authoritarian state would destroy history; however, in a world more like the one envisioned by Huxley, we’re voluntarily giving history up in favor of image, immediacy, and feeling good.

Television controlled by corporations rather than the state also threatens the foundation of democracy: freedom of information. Orwell thought the state would control information by banning books, as many oppressive governments have done. The Founding Fathers wrote the Bill of Rights to prevent government control of information. But television controls the flow of ideas by defining public discourse in...

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• Challenges: Television aims to avoid confusing its audience because confused viewers switch to another channel. It’s easy to make ideas accessible when the goal is entertaining rather than learning.
• Exposition: Instead of discourse using arguments, hypotheses, discussion, and counter-arguments, television presents stories with compelling images and music.

Education presented without prerequisites, challenges, and exposition is merely entertainment.

As a result of television’s redefinition of education, classrooms have lost their primacy, while teachers have remodeled classrooms and teaching methods after television. They’ve made incorporated multimedia and reduced exposition, reading, and writing.

Children are thus prepared to expect entertainment throughout their lives—from commerce, religion, news, and politics.

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• How does each medium affect our thinking? What is it teaching us?
• What is the medium’s moral bias?
• How does the medium dictate the type of content it presents and how it presents it.
• How does the medium encourage or discourage thinking?
• How does the medium define cultural concepts such as patriotism, devoutness, privacy, being well-informed, or civic responsibility?

We don’t need to agree on the answers; just asking the questions activates and reorients our minds. These and other questions are as applicable to computers as to television. For instance, computers teach us that all we need in order to solve any problem is sufficient data. However, data won’t address most personal problems, and it may be that computers ultimately create as many problems as they solve.

Only by seeing and understanding what it’s doing can we hope to gain control over television, the computer, or any other technology. The problem in Huxley’s Brave New World wasn’t that people were happy and laughing without thinking. It was that they’d forgotten what they were laughing about and why they’d stopped thinking.