AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH

Amusing Ourselves To Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death

In Neil Postman's book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Postman begins with the argument that the medium is the metaphor. By this, he means that mediums such as the printing press or television have a strong direct influence on our society. n the eighteenth century, public discourse was much different than it is today. That is mainly due to the shift from one medium to another. America's founding fathers were intelligent and exceptionally literate. This book has brought to light the problems that are faced by society in discerning reality and the picture of reality through television. The relevant excerpts from the book should more than help the reader understand the gist of the book.

Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering grey light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. And the peek-a-boo world it has constructed around us no longer seems even strange.

There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed. Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now almost complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. (Postman, Niel 1985)

According to Neil Postman, television has "conditioned us to tolerate visually entertaining material measured out in spoonfuls of time, to the detriment of rational public discourse and reasoned public affairs." In his eloquent and persuasively compelling book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the author alerts the readers to what he perceives the real and present dangers of this state of affairs regarding television and popular media, and offers compelling suggestions as to how to withstand the media onslaught. The book eloquently and convincingly argues and draws to light the fact the that television is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business in which all public affairs - politics, religion, news, education, journalism, commerce - have been turned into a form of entertainment. The book can be considered as an urgent plea for use to question what is happening before it is too late. It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. When the printing press was developed it caused reading and writing to become the main form of communication, because it was the only medium available. This written material demands a lot out of a reader including a ...