Author:: [[Neil Postman]] DateFinished:: 9-14-2023 Rating:: 9 Tags:: #🟥 # Amusing Ourselves to Death  ## 🚀The Book in 3 Sentences - The medium information is given through and the cultural context its in changes the meaning of the message. - Typographic America prized rational discourse in conversation and in its political leaders - During the 20th century, Television as a medium is creating an American culture that prizes entertainment over all else in information, we are amusing ourselves to death. ### 🎨 Impressions - Despite being written in the 60s this book is only becoming more relevant today. Except instead of television, it's social media and the internet that is causing the same effects described in the book but at a larger scale. - Neil Postman does a fantastic job outlining his arguments in a way where anyone reading can understand his points. It has a very clear logical structure and is quiet entertaining to listen to as well. ### 📖Who Should Read It? - Anyone interested in media studies - People interested in creating a better information diet ### ☘️ How the Book Changed Me - This book inspired me to go through my collect toolkit exercise again. Not only did I change the mediums of information I am consuming but I'm also changing the time I'm spending on each medium of information. More time consuming books, podcasts, and conversations and less time on blog posts, Twitter, YouTube, and more. - This book enlightened me to how important not only the content you consume is but also how you consume it. ### ✍️3 Favorite Quotes - **"The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether."** - Neil Postman - **We are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.** - Neil Postman - **"Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice."** - Neil Postman # Summary Major Concepts From The Book: - [[The medium is the message]] - [[Television has made entertainment the primary way American's engage with the world.]] - [[Human society has evolved through four main information cultures]] - [[What humans deem important in each of the four information cultures of history]] - [[Typographic America prized rational discourse]] - [[The higher the speed of information transfer, the higher the noise]] - [[Information as entertainment]] ## We Are Amusing Ourselves To Death "Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice." - Neil Postman > **"The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether."** - Neil Postman > **The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.** - Neil Postman We have transitioned from an age of Typography to an age of Television. ## The Medium Is The Message [[The medium is the message]] ## Television Has Made Entertainment The Primary Way American's Engage With The World [[Television has made entertainment the primary way American's engage with the world.]] ## Televisions Replacement In The Modern Era: Social Media **In social media culture information stays synonymous with entertainment, but at an even greater scale and disaster than with just television.** Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau, who remarked in Walden that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” As Neil Postman writes "telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity." **If telegraphy made boosted the proliferation of context free information, the internet and social media skyrocketed it to the moon.** You may get a sense for the uselessness of most of what you consume by asking yourself a series of questions: What have you applied from your consumption in the last few weeks? Has the world become a better place from your consumption? What relevance does what you consume have to the projects you are working on? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: nothing. ## How Can We Take Back Our Minds From Social Media And Television? We need to look at the mediums of information we consume in a new light. Ask yourself, are the mediums you consume information through helping you become a more empathetic, open minded, knowledgeable human being? **We have to transition back to the typographic mind of pre-television America.** "Reading would have had a sacred element in it, or if not that, would have at least occurred as a daily or weekly ritual invested with special meaning. What reading would have been done was done seriously, intensely, and with steadfast purpose." Here's what I suggest: prioritize consuming longform evergreen content through time tested mediums. My favorite three: conversation, podcasts, and books. Audible speech has been the primary method humans have communicated since our beginnings. ## Highlights ### 1. The Medium Is the Metaphor Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=260)) For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content. ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=314)) To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television. ([Location 327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=327)) What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. ([Location 368](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=368)) - Note: Most people for example, don’t question how there perception of the passing of time is a psycho technology. Humans didn’t naturally evolve to do this. It’s the creation of clocks that has made it normal to measure time. ### 2. Media as Epistemology Every medium of communication, I am claiming, has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large. Whatever the original and limited context of its use may have been, a medium has the power to fly far beyond that context into new and unexpected ones. Because of the way it directs us to organize our minds and integrate our experience of the world, it imposes itself on our consciousness and social institutions in myriad forms. It sometimes has the power to become implicated in our concepts of piety, or goodness, or beauty. And it is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate our ideas of truth. ([Location 472](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=472)) - Note: The meaning of content changes depending on the medium and context it’s given in. For example, in academia, a spoken quote reference wouldn’t be sufficient as evidence. This is because generally written words are seen as more trustworthy in that context. They have been fact checked, are less attached to the person saying the words, etc. As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it. Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life, Nietzsche remarked. To which we might add that every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development. Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented. Since intelligence is primarily defined as one’s capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication. In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability. The wise Solomon, we are told in First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. In a print culture, people with such a talent are thought to be quaint at best, more likely pompous bores. In a purely oral culture, a high value is always placed on the power to memorize, for where there are no written words, the human mind must function as a mobile library. To forget how something is to be said or done is a danger to the community and a gross form of stupidity. In a print culture, the memorization of a poem, a menu, a law or most anything else is merely charming. It is almost always functionally irrelevant and certainly not considered a sign of high intelligence. ([Location 575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=575)) - Note: This reminds me of how memorization has largely lost its importance today in comparison to the Medieval and Ancient Greek periods. Intelligence is relative. It changes depending upon which media is the predominant form of communication in a culture. ### 3. Typographic America The point all this is leading to is that from its beginning until well into the nineteenth century, America was as dominated by the printed word and an oratory based on the printed word as any society we know of. This situation was only in part a legacy of the Protestant tradition. As Richard Hofstadter reminds us, America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations. “The Founding Fathers,” he writes, “were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.” [40] A society shaped by such men does not easily move in contrary directions. We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover. Hofstadter has written convincingly of our efforts to “recover,” that is to say, of the anti-intellectual strain in American public life, but he concedes that his focus distorts the general picture. It is akin to writing a history of American business by concentrating on the history of bankruptcies.[41] The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of its monopoly. This point cannot be stressed enough, especially for those who are reluctant to acknowledge profound differences in the media environments of then and now. One sometimes hears it said, for example, that there is more printed matter available today than ever before, which is undoubtedly true. But from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was virtually all that was available. There were no movies to see, radio to hear, photographic displays to look at, records to play. There was no television. ([Location 854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=854)) ### 4. The Typographic Mind Is there any audience of Americans today who could endure seven hours of talk? or five? or three? Especially without pictures of any kind? Second, these audiences must have had an equally extraordinary capacity to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally. In Douglas’ Ottawa speech he included in his one-hour address three long, legally phrased resolutions of the Abolition platform. Lincoln, in his reply, read even longer passages from a published speech he had delivered on a previous occasion. For all of Lincoln’s celebrated economy of style, his sentence structure in the debates was intricate and subtle, as was Douglas’. ([Location 924](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=924)) People of a television culture need “plain language” both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience. ([Location 936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=936)) - Note: But there are movies on television with profound meaning. What marks the difference between what causes simple television versus complex television. To understand the role that the printed word played in providing an earlier America with its assumptions about intelligence, truth and the nature of discourse, one must keep in view that the act of reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had an entirely different quality to it than the act of reading does today. For one thing, as I have said, the printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect, there being no other means, besides the oral tradition, to have access to public knowledge. Public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory. It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents of the United States would not have been recognized had they passed the average citizen in the street. This would have been the case as well of the great lawyers, ministers and scientists of that era. To think about those men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge as codified in the printed word. ([Location 1164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1164)) these were different kinds of readers from those of today. There would have been little casual reading, for there was not a great deal of time for that. Reading would have had a sacred element in it, or if not that, would have at least occurred as a daily or weekly ritual invested with special meaning. For we must also remember that this was a culture without electricity. It would not have been easy to read by either candlelight or, later, gaslight. Doubtless, much reading was done between dawn and the start of the day’s business. What reading would have been done was done seriously, intensely, and with steadfast purpose. ([Location 1178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1178)) ### 5. The Peek-a-Boo World For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make “one neighborhood of the whole country.” It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse. Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau, who remarked in Walden that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”[1] ([Location 1228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1228)) These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning. ([Location 1238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1238)) You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. ([Location 1285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1285)) telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography. Books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas. It takes time to write a book, and to read one; time to discuss its contents and to make judgments about their merit, including the form of their presentation. A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. Therefore, civilized people everywhere consider the burning of a book a vile form of anti-intellectualism. But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents. The value of telegraphy is undermined by applying the tests of permanence, continuity or coherence. The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. ([Location 1301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1301)) Twenty years ago, the question, Does television shape culture or merely reflect it? held considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. The question has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture. This means, among other things, that we rarely talk about television, only about what is on television—that is, about its content. Its ecology, which includes not only its physical characteristics and symbolic code but the conditions in which we normally attend to it, is taken for granted, accepted as natural. ([Location 1452](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1452)) ### Part II. ### 6. The Age of Show Business in answering the question, What is television?, we must understand as a first point that we are not talking about television as a technology but television as a medium. There are many places in the world where television, though the same technology as it is in America, is an entirely different medium from that which we know. I refer to places where the majority of people do not have television sets, and those who do have only one; where only one station is available; where television does not operate around the clock; where most programs have as their purpose the direct furtherance of government ideology and policy; where commercials are unknown, and “talking heads” are the principal image; where television is mostly used as if it were radio. For these reasons and more television will not have the same meaning or power as it does in America, which is to say, it is possible for a technology to be so used that its potentialities are prevented from developing and its social consequences kept to a minimum. ([Location 1510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1510)) But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. ([Location 1537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1537)) That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to “join them tomorrow.” What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the “news” is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say. Everything about a news show tells us this—the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials—all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping. ([Location 1542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1542)) - Note: This hits my problems with dad watching the news so hard. Therefore—and this is the critical point—how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. As typography once dictated the style of conducting politics, religion, business, education, law and other important social matters, television now takes command. In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials. ([Location 1620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1620)) ### 7. “Now . . . This” For all his perspicacity, George Orwell would have been stymied by this situation; there is nothing “Orwellian” about it. The President does not have the press under his thumb. The New York Times and The Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass. And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference. Which is why Aldous Huxley would not in the least be surprised by the story. Indeed, he prophesied its coming. He believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil’s observation that “Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody. ([Location 1890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=1890)) ### 8. Shuffle Off to Bethlehem ### 9. Reach Out and Elect Someone Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser’s claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald’s commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama—a mythology, if you will—of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it. ([Location 2148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=2148)) television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by “better” such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with “image.” ([Location 2237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=2237)) ### 10. Teaching as an Amusing Activity We now know that Sesame Street encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street. ([Location 2380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=2380)) John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes . . . may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history. . . . For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”[1] In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. ([Location 2399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0023ZLLH6&location=2399)) - Note: This is an argument for why learning things you might not use in real life can be useful. It’s the learning how to learn and love for learning we foster that matters. Too bad that’s undermined by grades.