Book Review Amusing Ourselves to Death By Neil Postman

Published in 1985, 40 years later, Amusing Ourselves to Death has maintained relevance as it has aged. While reading I pondered, what Postman would have to say about us living in 2025, in the age of social media and A.I.? Although now deceased, he does answer questions such as: What is the impact on a culture when all information is designed to entertain and delight? How has the way we interact with media changed? Why is nothing serious anymore? Postman alludes to these answers in his book, predicting the future as well as anyone could in 1985

Here’s a run down of my take-aways from each chapter with some of my favorite quotes:

Chapter 1. The Medium is the Metaphor

• “Television has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse”
• Word-centered to image-centered culture
• “The media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations”

How information is experienced has gone through extensive changes recently. Written word versus visual media as a primary means of communication can alter our mental perceptions as well as how we communicate with one another.

Chapter 2. Media as Epistemology

• “Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now — generally coherent, serious, and rational”
• “Television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations”
• “The decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute”
• “In the twentieth century, our notions of truth and our ideas of intelligence have changed as a result of new media displacing the old”
• “A major new medium changes the structure of discourse”
• “As typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television takes it place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines
• Epistemology defined, the origins and and nature of knowledge

Postman makes several arguments I agree with in this chapter, namely that our society has undergone a shift to the “unserious” as we become less reliant on print and more reliant on screens.

Chapter 3.Typographic America

• “Reading was not regarded as an elitist activity, and printed matter was spread evenly among all kinds of people”
• “A keen taste for books prevailed among the general population”
• “Form will determine the nature of content”

It is shown that before there were screens, everyone read, specifically in 17th century America as there was no other way to gain information or be entertained. This contrasts starkly with today, where it is pretentious to be seen reading a book in public. Print was king and there was nothing to rival it.

Chapter 4. The Typographic Mind

• “A language-centered discourse… tends to be content-laden and serious”
• “The character of discourse expected of one whose mind is formed by the printed word”
• “The printed page revealed the world, line by line, page by page, to be a serious, coherent place, capable of management by reason”

Here Postman details how when information was gained solely through the written word public discourse was serious and well-reasoned.

Chapter 5. The Peek-a-Boo World

• “Telegraphy made relevance irrelevant… information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressing”
• “To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing lots of things, not knowing about them”
• “Photography… did not merely function as a supplement to language, but bid to replace it as our dominant means for construing, understanding and testing reality”
• “A peek-a-boo world , where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again”
• “Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business”

I disagreed with the author in this chapter. He argues that the creation of the telegram inundated the everyday person with irrelevant information. I would reject this assumption and say that the access to news in places foreign to us has made us more empathetic. The knowledge of cultures and struggles even accessed through a medium of a telegram or television allows the viewer to acknowledge lives different from their own that have value

Chapter 6. The Age of Show Business

• “Television does not extend or amplify literate culture, it attacks it”
• “We know that the news is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun”
• The nature of discourse is changing “ as the demarcation line between what is show business and what is not becomes harder to see with each passing day”

Everything isn’t supposed to be entertainment

Chapter 7. “Now…This”

• “Keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement”
• “Television is altering the meaning of being informed”
• “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”

News channels that are built to amuse not inform. Information gained from a tv loses its importance, filling daily discourse with non-sensical b.s.

Chapter 8. Shuffle off to Bethlehem

• “Enchatment is the means through which we will gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it”

The shift of entertainment in religious practices

Chapter 9. Reach out and Elect Someone

• “Politicians began to put themselves forward, intentionally, as sources of amusement”
• “Television clearly does impair the students’ freedom to read, and it does so with innocent hands, so to speak. Television does not ban books it simply displaces them”
• “The difference between serious discourse and entertainment”

The shift of politicians as entertainers

Chapter 10. Teaching as an Amusing Activity

• “The classroom is, at the moment, still tied to the printed word, although that connection is rapidly weakening”
• “The idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable”
• “Refashioning of the classroom into a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be vastly amusing activities”
• “Teachers’ efforts, in some instances unconscious, to make their classrooms into second-rate television shows”

The shift of the classroom as a place of entertainment instead of learning

Chapter 11. The Huxleyan Warning

• “In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him by ours”
• “An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan”
• “Only through a deep and failing awareness of the structure and effects of information… is there any hope of gaining some measure of control over television”

Postman compares the books Brave New World by Adolus Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell. He compares Orwell’s highly surveilled world with Huxley’s world of voluntary escapism. Postman comes to the conclusion that our demise will not be an outside, unmistakeable evil, but one crafted by our own choices.

I thought this book had many compelling ideas, although it gets carried away in some places. It’s also hard not to see all of the warnings in this book manifest themselves into daily life. Everyone walking around looking at their phones, children unable to read at grade level, presidents who are more comical than stately. Postman poses one viable solution that involves the education system as a place for media literacy and learning. However in current times of attacks on public education, the defunding of research, and artificial intelligence, the future is looking pretty darn grim.