I wish I could say I was enlightened enough to pick this up and read it of my own volition, but I didn’t. It was required reading for a graduate course in multimedia. However, I can say I have reread it twice just for fun, since that time. It really got me to think in some new ways and profoundly changed my perspective on how I analyze electronic media.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business reflects on the different detrimental ways electronic media has had on discourse in America. He argues that dialogue in politics, news, religion and education has taken on the form of entertainment to such a large degree that we are in danger of descending into pure triviality.

While the book was first published in 1985 and concentrates mostly on the transition from printed media to television, most of Postman’s warnings still ring true, especially in this internet saturated age.

Postman laments the loss of thinking conceptually, deductively, sequentially, and with a sense of detachment and reflection that written exposition provides and challenges us with. Electronic media, he argues, offers context free information and superficial facts with little to no historical perspective. This leads one into a world of fragments of discontinuity. Discourse is reduced to sound bites.  People become full of trivia, with little ability to connect or put into perspective the many facts.

It is especially dangerous when television tries to present itself as a serious medium and make important matters into a form of entertainment. It can be difficult to find the nuggets of truth contained in the sheer volume of triviality that one is forced to digest.  We will become amused into indifference.

By comparing Orwell to Huxley, he puts his argument in perspective right from the beginning:

“Orwell warns we will be overcome by 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 capacity to think…This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Whether or not you agree wholly, in part, or not at all, with Postman’s views, it will give you some things to ponder and some macro-level perspectives when analyzing discourse in the age of electronic media.