Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), is a controversial book by Neil Postman in which he argues that mediums of communication inherently influence the conversations carried out over them. Postman posits that television is the primary means of communication for our culture and it has the property of converting conversations into entertainment so much so that public discourse on important issues has disappeared. Since the treatment of serious issues as entertainment inherently prevents them from being treated as serious issues and indeed since serious issues have been treated as entertainment for so many decades now, the public is no longer aware of these issues in their original sense, but only as entertainment. ("Conversations" in the sense here of a culture communicating with itself).

The book originated with Postman's delivering a talk to the Frankfurt Booksellers Convention in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell's 1984 and the contemporary world.

It has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide.

Metaphor

Postman argues that communication mediums inherently shape the conversations that can be carried out. To take an extreme example, it is not possible to conduct a discussion of philosophy using smoke signals; the conversation is too complex and long to be conducted over such a low bandwidth medium.

Postman in particular describes two mediums of communication, print and television, and the ways in which they influence the conversations carried out using them.

(Note here that we are talking about the conversations a culture has with itself.)

Print

Printed material inherently makes assertions. It is almost impossible to write a meaningful sentence which does not make an assertion; and as such, when reading, the reader is being presented with assertions which they are required to agree with, to suspend judgement upon, or to refute.

A book is essentially a very long set of assertions which build an argument. The reader has to keep track of the assertions, build up an overall picture, and come to a conclusion of his own, which may or may not match or fully match the view of the author.

Postman asserts print as a medium encourages thought and judgement upon arguments and so that when print is the primary means of communication (as it was in the USA, for example, up to the late 1800s) then culture as a whole has a strong, effective public discourse on important issues. People are not only well informed, but have a strong understanding of the issues of the day.

Television

Television as a medium is inherently assertionless; a video of an event makes no assertions whatsoever. It merely displays something that occurred. For example, an advertisement for McDonald's says nothing about the burgers, their nutritional value, their cost or position in the market compared to the competition; instead, it shows happy, smiling children eating McDonald's burgers, followed by a happy clown.

A viewer can like or dislike a McDonald's advertisement, but he cannot accept or refute it, because there is nothing to accept or refute.

Summary

Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from the vision offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves