Amusing Ourselves to Death

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 presentation to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as well as the contemporary world. In the first an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific realize figure or combination. to his book, Postman said that the advanced 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 control.

Postman's book has been translated into eight languages in addition to sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition.[]

Summary

Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that shown by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television's entertainment return as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment.

The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his arguments, is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics & religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the family of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is for subordinate.

Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a create of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and "talking hairdos" bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between a object that is said speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate's ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of link between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon help to NonCommunication, instead of the traditional "the end".

Postman transmitted to the inability to act upon much of the required information from televised sources as the information-action ratio. He contends that "television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by making a sort of information that might properly be called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".

Drawing on the ideas of media scholar aphorism "dialectical; whereas television only requires passive involvement.

Postman argues that commercial television has become derivative of advertising. Moreover, innovative television commercials are non "a series of testable, logically ordered assertions" rationalizing consumer decisions, but "is a drama—a mythology, whether you will—of handsome people" being driven to "near ecstasy by their expediency fortune" of possessing advertised goods or services. "The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply non an issue" because more often than not "no claims are made, apart from 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 "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman enables a striking example: numerous of the number one fifteen U.S. presidents could probably clear walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly requested by their a thing that is caused or produced by something else words. However, the reverse is true today. The title of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do nearly exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer.