Amusing Ourselves to Death

7/10

Postman wrote this polemic on Television in 1984. The World Wide Web was incepted in 1989. We'd have to wait until 2006 till Twitter launches and the 2010s until it takes over public discourse but the obsolescence of the all-might Television since then lends the book a certain retro-futuristic aspect...for a lack of words. That's not to say it's rendered irrelevant because its core arguments still resounds strongly as ever if not stronger.

- Cultures are defined by their medium of communication.
- Mediums have their own latent biases.
- No medium is fit for all discourse.

I think the average informed citizen of today's world, with their temporal proximity to Facebook genocides and The Culture War, has an intuition if not a deep understanding of what Postman was furiously gesturing at then, especially the last point. Sure, the specific form of the dangers warned of herein don't apply anymore but I think there's something to be gained from his appeals and attitude to just how critical the subject matter. To use his own words:

For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are.

...only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.

Neil Postman wrote this critique of the television back in the 1980s. His primary thesis was that, we, as a society are slowly killing coherent dialogue due to the propagation of mass media. In a lot of senses, the stance that Postman is taking maybe agreeable at face value, but Postman takes an extremist stance on the matter - he really hates the medium of TV. I can't even imagine what Postman will think about the world we live in today.

Postman starts off building his argument by describing the times before visual media. Here he talks about how public discourse took place in the 1700s and 1800s - the public debates, the nuance is discussions and the public enthusiasm for long form exposition. To be completely honest, this is the part of the book that I found a little too long winded. It is very USA-centric, exalting the various public figures prominent in American history. This portion went on for way too long, especially for someone like me who does not share the same enthusiasm for Americana that Postman shares. Despite all this, there are a few good points he brings up on the history of public discourse before the visual era. The major idea that I took away is that the medium of discourse shapes the discourse itself.

The book really picks up after Postman starts talking about the advent of the printing press and the television era. The typography era popularised books as the primary medium for sharing information and public discourse. Postman argues that only after the invention of the telegraph, public discourse slowly started shifting towards the meaningless.

Irrelevance, incoherence and impotence.

The telegraph meant that the world became a smaller place. Information traveled much faster, and as a consequence, the noise in the information increased exponentially. The word "knowledge" itself started to become redefined. What is knowledge? Knowledge used to be something that you had a deep contextual understanding in. Post the telegraph era, knowledge and information started to become more decontextualised. It became more irrelevant. We stopped letting the news and the information that we consume affect our daily actions in any relevant way.

In many ways I found Twitter to be something of a parallel to the telegraph. Each tweet is this bit of decontextualised information - irrelevant, incoherent and impotent. I found this critique on the meaning of knowledge, and the importance of meaning itself, very interesting.

Soon after this, Postman gets to the meat of his thesis - we as a society are amusing ourselves to death. Television has changes the path of public discourse. As mentioned earlier, Postman truly believes that the medium of discourse shapes the discourse. With this idea as his foundation, Postman breaks down the medium of the television to be ill suited for any meaningful discourse. One of the most contrarian stands that Postman takes is how shows like "Sesame Street", which made education fun for children, are actually more harmful than say, some reality TV show. He posits that television for education builds its programming on a few basic tenets: 1. The content should not perplex the audience 2. The content should have no prerequisites. 3. The content should avoid long expositions.

What is education devoid of perplexity, prerequisites and exposition? Entertainment. We are fooling ourselves into thinking we are educating ourselves. Postman also says that the reason why television is so harmful is that it is competing against typographic media, not complementing it. I couldn't agree with Postman more on this point. He is a very eloquent writer, and the way he builds up his almost luddite sounding arguments is really fun to read.

Closing thoughts.

There is this whole portion on religion and television that I found mostly uninteresting. That, and the excessive America-centrism in the opening chapters are things that I didn't enjoy too much in this book. But, there are a lot of excellent ideas in this book that are very applicable even today. This book has aged really well. It makes you think about where we are going as a society, the way various media are shaping how and, more importantly, what we talk about. One could always argue that the television became hugely popular, and yet, here we are as a people. This is something that even I thought of, but one cannot deny that we have set ourselves back in many ways by allowing our contemporary public discourse to degrade to memes and 5 second sound bytes. This ties in really well with Tristan Harris' thesis on how we are effectively reducing the public IQ by allowing social media to shape public discourse. I highly recommend watching this interview with him on the Joe Rogan podcast - it will change the way you look at today's mediums of communication:

Neil Postman was way ahead of his time. He knew the value of the medium of public discourse, and he perfectly recognized what we are doing to ourselves - we are amusing ourselves to death.

I give this book a strong 7/10.

If I was reading this book in 1985 or 1995 or even 2005, I'd give it five stars. Reading it today, I vacillated between wishing that Dr. Postman was around to write something similar about social media (I long to hear his evisceration of Twitter) and being glad that that poor man died before he had to confront the current reality. He didn't deserve that headache.

Frankly, the best way to read this book is to apply the questions he asks about television to social media. The answers you arrive at are terrifying but necessary. The medium is the message and the metaphor, of course, but it also shapes the way we think and talk to each other. It sure would be nice if we started thinking about how these technologies would affect us before we let them totally take over our lives, but I guess that's too much to ask of humanity.

The first half was really good. It is a sort of summary of the intellectual history of reading and literacy of the United States. It tells the story from the Colonial period up until the age of telegraphy and photography (that is, sometime in the middle to the late nineteenth century).

Second half felt kind of just a rehash of the arguments already made in the first part.

I am unconvinced of the examples about how television is not a good medium for education, at least in early or lower-level education. I do not think that education being entertaining is problematic at this level. Of course, for deeper thought, at the level of higher education, you'd have to read books and journal articles, etc.

That part about religion is interesting. Postman says that it is not possible for television to be a sacral space because of the 'peek-a-boo' quality, and the memory of people of the 'peek-a-boo'-ness or the 'now-this'-ness of television. But what if it is possible? A new version of sacrality, a new techno-religious-ness shall we say. I don't know.

Overall this has been an enlightening read. I plan on re-reading the first part sometime because I really liked it.

This is quite possibly the most depressing book I have ever read. The author not only shares my view that television (or mass media) has undermined nearly every aspect of Western (particularly, but not exclusively, American) culture, but he explains exactly how the damage was done. Unfortunately I think we've passed the point of no return.

In the forward, Postman writes: "Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in 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 love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. . . . Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. . . . This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."

DeedThesis in chapter 2 is silly

Historical review of the written word in chapter 3 is interesting.

Discussion in chapter 4 of the "typographic" mind Is built on a sequence of "No true Scotsman"-style critical thinking errors and generalizing from exceptions. This chapter is destroying my trust in the author. He expresses the opinion that psychology and porosity all reasoning are opposed to each other.

Chapter 5 -- he makes up a lot of terms where perfectly good ones exist. E.g. Samuel Morse's " information grid. " it's a network, buddy; not a grid. No one calls it a grid. His arguments again decontexualized information does not support his thesis, as there has always been unactionable information. He complains that the world now lacks coherence and sense. This is a symptom of information overload. Perhaps the author is unable to cope with all the information availability and has lost his ability to support his worldview narrative. Redefined "myth" to mean "biases." Agree with him that people often accept what they see on TV without critical thought. However, I think that the so-called millennial generation is most critical of what they're shown on television and openly critique every aspect of it, including the medium's idioms and tropes.

Part 3.
Disagree completely with his statement that technology has an inherent bias. Particularly because right before he said that, he explained very carefully that the bias came from the social "medium" the technology creates, not the technology itself.

I don't disagree with him completely. His reasoning is seriously flawed and is coupled with a cocky attitude. In ending the book here on page 84 out of 163, and declaring this book a "recyclable good." (I intentionally left it in the seatback pocket of an airplane.)