Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business - Neil Postman.epub

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death examines the effect of television on American society, with two main conclusions. The first, that television has changed the way Americans think and react to events, is persuasive and well argued. Postman presents a wide array of evidence, anecdotal and statistical, to show that information from television is processed in different ways from information presented in text --what he names “the typographic mind”--and personal conversations. This leads naturally to the second and central point of Postman’s argument, that the changes in public behavior spurred by television have been detrimental to American society. Unfortunately, this, the book’s central thesis, is less than persuasive.

Part of the problem is that Postman loses his objectivity when discussing the ramifications of television. It’s clear that Postman himself doesn’t like or trust televised information, and the bias shows in his choice of studies and anecdotes. When he claims that studies show televised information is quickly forgotten and then admits offhandedly that other studies disagree, or argues that Sesame Street doesn’t teach children numbers and letters, and that if it does that’s irrelevant, his obvious disinclination towards television comes through. Part of the problem is simply that Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, and serious studies on information issues were fewer and less developed than today. But in giving credence only to those studies which bolster his argument and dismissing all others, Postman proves nothing other than that television does have some effect on viewers, which he considers negative.

Despite these limitations, Amusing Ourselves To Death is a compelling, and useful, text. It contributes a useful vocabulary for discussing changes in information technology. Now some twenty-plus years out of date, many of the studies and predictions Postman relies on have been challenged or disproved altogether, and such recent developments in communications as the rise of the internet make the idea of a television/textbook binary argument archaic. But in examining the form and content of televised news, and questioning the acceptance of any media, Amusing Ourselves To Death makes itself an essential tool for an informed audience.