Books - Amusing Ourselves to Death

Home > Listing Index > Books > Amusing Ourselves to Death

	Books - 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 argued that mediums of communication inherently influence the conversations carried out over them, that television is the primary means of communication for our culture, that television has the property of converting conversations into entertainment and 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. ("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.

Medium is The 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 bandwith 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 advert for MacDonalds 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 MacDonalds burgers, followed by a happy clown.

A viewer can like or dislike a MacDonalds advert, but he cannot accept or refute it, because there is nothing to accept or refute.

Summary

Postman distinguished 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 into bliss and voluntarily sacrifice their rights. Postman sees television's entertainment value as a "soma" for the contemporary world, and he sees contemporary mankind surrendering its rights in exchange for entertainment.

The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content," that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Rational argument, an integral component of print typography, cannot be conveyed through the medium of television because "its form excludes the content." Because of this shortcoming, politics and religion get diluted, and "news of the day" is turned into a commodity. Ultimately, presentation most often outweighs quality; all information becomes enslaved to the overarching necessities of entertainment.

Postman objects to the presentation of television news as it is conveyed in the form of entertainment programming. He cites the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and "talking hairdos" as the basis for his argument that televised news is presented so that it cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which relies mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles. He argues that politics has ceased to be about whatever ideas or solutions a particular candidate may possess, but instead whether or not they come across in a favourable way on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which indicates a complete absence of any connection between one topic and the next. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication, instead of the traditional "the end".

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Amusing Ourselves to Death ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Amusing Ourselves to Death; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay