Neil Postman’s classic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business, is

an assessment of the shifts in Western culture since the advent of modern communication technologies.
This is the sort of book that was prophetic in its day and, although somewhat dated, still communicates
significant warnings to readers now.

Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, during the Reagan presidency. It certainly does not
escape Postman’s notice that the ascendency of an actor to the highest political office supports his point
that entertainment has become the central purpose of American culture, though that fact is more a
capstone illustration of the book’s greater point than the central argument of concern.

What Postman notes, however, is worth paying attention to. His central premise is that the medium is
the metaphor. This is an intentional deviation from Marshall McLuhan’s famous slogan that the medium
is the message.

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Postman’s clarification is helpful, since it separates the content of the message from vehicle that carries
the message. In other words, the facts of the news are the same (if written well), but the secondary
signals created by the means that the news is transmitted also shape the reception of the news.

For example, Postman notes that prior to the invention of the telegraph, most newspapers focused
almost exclusively on local news. The telegraph sped up the spread of national and international news,
so that information could be had within minutes rather than days or weeks. The change was not wrought
overnight, but the shift of concern from local issues to global ones has completely overtaken us today.
Notably, it is much easier for me to find out about the personal lives of political leaders across the globe
than to find out what the local city council is talking about.

Not only has news changed, but education has changed. Instead of doing the long, hard work of training
minds, much of our educational methodology has shifted to entertainment. Postman notes that Sesame
Street is a prime example of this, though certainly neither the worst nor the only platform that does this.
According to Postman, whatever good is done by teaching through entertainment is undermined as it
forms the learning human to expect education to be exciting. Thus, the endurance to learn and slog
through difficult tasks has been diminished by the medium that is very effective in achieving short term
gains.
It would be easy to claim that Postman was merely clutching at pearls, if the evidence did not point
overwhelmingly toward the aggravation of the problems he identifies.

The point is not that technology is bad, but that technology is most effective if it is used in a particular
manner. As a result, it is most commonly used in its most suitable manner, which shapes the media
consumer in powerful ways. The efficacy of each medium to convey certain parallel signals effortlessly
alters people’s epistemologies.

(Epistemology is the study of the way that people know things. Whether or not we know how to spell it,
everyone has an epistemology.)

Not only how we acquire information but how we know is shaped by how information is received. Media
is forming our minds to perceive in particular manners.

We need look no farther than click-bait internet articles to see that Postman is correct. There are entire
companies that feed off of deceptive headlines that declare one thing in their headline and argue
something entirely different in the body of the article. Even news sources that are still considered
credible have recognized that few people read beyond the headlines and those who do are unlikely to
get past the perspective that the headline has already presented, whatever the evidence is that runs to
the contrary.

The reshaping of epistemology is radically important, even more so now than it was in 1985. Our
elections have been tampered with by agents from other nations who spread misinformation with just
enough truth to cast doubt. Our news sources have recognized this, along with the inability to discern
opinion from fact in most of the population, and thus they have largely abandoned anything like an
attempt at objective reporting because getting their constructed truth out is more important the facts.
Additionally, with the wide array of “news” shows of varying degree of accuracy and political leanings
available all 168 hours each week, the presentation of information has to be even more entertaining
than before. In our current milieu, there appear to be a fair number of people that get their news
through comments on social media rather than any legitimate news source (regardless of its bias). So,
the cycle continues and the hole gets deeper.

Postman’s warning is an important one. It may even be easier to accept now that a quarter of a century
has passed and the challenges have morphed.
Lacking from Postman’s analysis is an answer the for the disease that ails us. He’s standing athwart
history yelling “STOP,” but does not provide a solution.

The truth is that there is no easy solution, and that the simplest solution (i.e., turning everything off
completely), is unworkable because we and our children would be functionally disconnected from so
much of society. However, we have to figure out a way to throttle the flow, learn how to think and exist
without electronic devices, and recover some of the humanity that is being eroded with every flicker of
our many screens.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

By Neil Postman

Buy on Amazon

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