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

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

From the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity comes a sustained, withering and thought-provoking attack on television and what it is doing to us. Postman’s theme is the decline of the printed word and the ascendancy of the “tube” with its tendency to present everythingmurder, mayhem, politics, weatheras entertainment. The ultimate effect, as Postman sees it, is the shrivelling of public discourse as TV degrades our conception of what constitutes news, political debate, art, even religious thought. Early chapters trace America’s one-time love affair with the printed word, from colonial pamphlets to the publication of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. There’s a biting analysis of TV commercials as a form of “instant therapy” based on the assumption that human problems are easily solvable. Postman goes further than other critics in demonstrating that television represents a hostile attack on literate culture. October 30
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

User Ratings and Reviews

4 Stars Thought-provoking
Great treatise on the idea that television turns all of life into entertainment and undermines other forms of communication. That serious issues like politics, religion, education and news are nothing more than brief sound bytes, fed to us in tiny but dramatic spoonfuls before turning tail and going on to something else, and that this disconnected, fragmented barrage degrades its significance and desensitizes us over time. He particularly laments the fall of the written word, and those of us who love to read and appreciate the importance of it probably concur. He surprised me with his theory that contrary to what most people – including me – assume, it’s not the junk tv that poses the threat, but the so-called ‘serious’, pseudo-intellectual stuff that is really just junk dressed up as something meaningful, and that that is more harmful than junk that doesn’t pretend to be what it isn’t. It was a powerful argument and although I’m not sure I agree with it 100%, the point was well-taken.

2 Stars Huxley’s Vision Manifest?
Neil Postman’s 1984 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is an engaging, if not depressing treatise on why Aldous Huxley’s dark vision of humanity’s future as thoughtless, mind-numbed entertainment-gluts in his 1932 novel, A Brave New World (Huxley reassesses the future world he envisioned in 1958 with the essay A Brave New World Revisited) was more accurate than George Orwell’s vision of an oppressive, book-banning, power-hungry authority asserting vast control over the masses as outlined in Orwell’s equally dystopic 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. While the prevention of the Orwellian nightmare occupied the generation preceding–and to only a slightly lesser extent since–the year 1984, it was Huxley’s future, Postman argues, that we should have been–and still should be and forever remain–on guard against. “[I]n 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 . . . adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” (Foreword, vii)

Postman’s book is a cause-and-effect cultural polemic, warning us that public discourse is dissolving into “the arts of show business” and “vast triviality” (p. 5 and 6), and he puts the blame squarely on television. While the argument is worth making and the debate worth having, his philosophical waxing leaves me wanting to say the least. For example, he opines that a fat man could not run for President of these United States today because the “grossness of a three-hundred-pound image (on TV) . . . would easily overwhelm any logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech.” (p. 7) There is no acknowledgment from Postman that obesity is a serious health concern and in an era in which those health concerns were and are well known, it is not unreasonable to infer than an obese person lacks personal self-discipline and will power, two characteristics reasonably desirable in the leader of the free world. To counter Postman directly, the shape of a man’s body may, in fact, be quite relevant to the shape of his ideas. Additionally, in a world of nuclear proliferation and persistent and consistent armed conflict, it can be argued that an unhealthy President poses a national security threat.

Many of Postman’s premises underpinning his theses seem to be ill-formed or just plain illogical. Take for example his surprising suggestion that “half the principles of capitalism . . . are irrelevant” and “that economics is less a science than a performing art.” (p. 5) Economics at its core is the study of how societies allocate their limited resources, and to reduce this to a performing art, even hyperbolically, undermines the argument being made. The economics of capitalism are far too regarded to simply be carelessly sacrificed on his rhetorical altar without considerably more evidence than Postman provides. He offers only the uncredited observation that “American businessmen discovered . . . that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of their display.” (p. 4) While peripherally true, this has little bearing on the relevance of capitalism or the rigors of economic study. Perhaps Postman’s own public discourse should be elevated.

Similarly, his contradictory suggestion that “people of a television culture need `plain language’ both aurally and visually” (p. 46) is patently absurd. On the one hand, Postman rails against television for dumbing down our public discourse, then on the other, suggests dumbed down discourse is all a television culture can handle. Perhaps a wiser argument could be made favoring elevated discourse in our television programming rather than presuming those that watch television are too stupid to understand it.

I have cited but a handful of examples in Postman’s book of how his thesis is weakened by seemingly plausible but ultimately misleading arguments. But the same can be said of his thesis as a whole. Public discourse in this country was not weakened by the advent of the television; it was weakened by the advent of weak public discourse. Television is not the cause of weaker public discourse, it is the result of it, notwithstanding Postman’s unpersuasive intimation (chapter 2) of a media-induced epistemological shift (e.g. we no longer communicate through symbols carved on cave walls and I dare say we are no worse for having lost that mode of communication and arguably better).

Postman provides little evidence that television has damaged America’s body politic or retarded the growth of our intellectual discourse, public or otherwise. The contribution of television to historic, citizen-based changes such as the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam and Iraq wars and the protests those wars spawned, the environmental movement, and even the end of the Cold War deserve discussion in any examination of media and politics, yet is completely absent in this brief volume. Postman’s dissertation about how the pre-television age empowered our citizens fails to acknowledge any of America’s infamous atrocities (slavery, Native American genocide, etc.). It would be erroneous to assign sole responsibility for any of these social events to a single dominant form of media, but Postman seems to do just that with regard to our modern ills, of which there are not only plenty, but plenty of causes. In largely ignoring the relationship between media and the social events of the day that also define “the television culture,” Postman’s arguments for media influence seem both irrelevant and na