Amusing Ourselves to Death

Television has changed a lot since 1985. Very few people today, especially the younger generation, watch TV in the same way it was watched in 1985. Netflix and Amazon, companies that started out as distributors, are now a hot ticket in creating TV content. Of course, unlike the old days, you can stream it on demand – whenever you like, and wherever you like.

You might wonder if Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, focusing on the pernicious effects of TV, would be relevant in the age of the Internet. I read the 20^th Anniversary edition (cover shown below). The 2005 edition includes a forward by the author’s son Andrew Postman, contextualizing the book for the new millenium A lot has changed since then. But the excellent summary on the back flap is still prescient, and that was 13 years ago.

“Television has habituated us to visual entertainment measured out in spoonfuls of time. But what happens when we come to expect the same things from our politics and public discourse? What happens to journalism, education, and religion when they too become forms of show business? Twenty years ago, Neil Postman’s lively polemic was the first book to consider the way that electronic media were reshaping our culture. Now, with TV joined by the internet, cell phones, cable, and DVDs, Amusing Ourselves to Death carries even greater significance. Elegant, incisive, and terrifically readable, it’s a compelling take on our addiction to entertainment.”

I agree with the summary. Not only is it eminently readable, you would benefit from reading it slowly and chewing over the arguments. Yes, Postman couches the book in terms of a particular technology in his day and age – television of the ‘80s. But he spends the first half of the book setting up the philosophical framework for tackling the issue (“public discourse in the age of show business” is the subtitle). He compares the habits of thought engendered by the written word (in its potential to promote longer, complex, arguments and discourse) to the bite-size, attention grabbing, simplifying medium of TV.  That early half sets the stage for his subsequent examples in entertainment TV, commercials, political programming, televangelism, and of course, education.

But the first comparison is with the telegraph – forerunner to the television. Postman writes: “Books are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas. It takes time … to read one; time to discuss its contents and to make judgments about their merit… A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation… Therefore, civilized people everywhere consider the burning of a book a vile form of anti-intellectualism.”

In contrast: “… the contribution of the telegraph was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence… [it] also made public discourse entirely incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention… [its capacity is] to move information, not collect it, explain it, or analyze it… 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… To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing lots of things, not knowing about them.” (This reminds me of the ticker that is now ubiquitous at the bottom of your screen in news programs on TV.)

Postman differentiates between a technology and its medium. “… a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind… the brain [is] a physical apparatus… like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put…. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates… [However] each technology has an agenda of its own.” Postman’s key assertion is that “entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted… it is for our amusement and pleasure.” While I’m quoting bits and pieces from his book (and he would not be amused by this), Postman does provide excellent examples, and I recommend reading them in full.

I guess I’m doing what TV does. Giving you the highlights. Advertising. Maybe you’ll read the book. In the era of ‘fake news’, it is interesting to read that “… television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation… Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing… [not] that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world… [but] when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.”

The examples Postman provides in politics are particularly striking given he was writing in the midst of the Reagan administration, with a country helmed by a president from the show-business world. Today, we have a different president from the news-cable-internet show-business world. The similarities of the underlying fundamentals are uncanny to say the least. (You’ll have to read the book.) Having recently thought about the relationship between science and religion and how the two groups communicate with each other, I found Postman’s analysis of televangelism both fascinating and sad. (I did not grow up in the U.S. and have seen very little televangelism myself.)

As an educator, the most striking chapter was Postman’s analysis of education – investigating Sesame Street, Nova, and other educational programming. I learned about The Voyage of the Mimi project, which I’d never heard of before. But thanks to the Internet, I can read all about it now in hindsight. Postman lists three ‘commandments’ for making education ‘televisible’.

·      Thou shalt have no prerequisites.

·      Thou shalt induce no perplexity.

·      Thou shat avoid exposition like the [plague].

Now, that’s entertainment.

Is this why ‘active learning’ has increasingly gained in popularity in the educational consciousness? Students no longer read their textbooks ahead of time? Students can’t follow a lecture based on exposition? If the teacher or professor is not ‘interesting’ (i.e. entertaining), then it’s ‘hard’ to learn? In our rush as educators to embrace these ‘active learning’ pedagogies, have we declared ourselves defeated by students who grew up being constantly amused, they don’t know how to learn without amusement? I’m all in favor of engaging students using different pedagogies, but we (both teachers and students) need to acknowledge that learning is hard. Some things come naturally, but much of what is important to learn at school does not come so easily (it’s biologically secondary, to use Geary’s classification). That’s why we have school. That’s why a curriculum needs to be structured, layer by layer, because that’s how we learn skills and knowledge that are otherwise perplexing.

Fragmented reading and skimming have become part of my daily life. Amusing Ourselves to Death reminds me that it need not be so. I should be more selective in what I read, but also take the time to read and remember. Much of what I ‘read’ is fleeting, just like images on a screen that inexorably move from one to another. It’s worth slowing down to read, think and reflect.

P.S. For older books that have become even more relevant in the age of the Internet, here are my posts on Technological System (1980, English translation) and The Logic of Failure (1996, English translation).