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Key insights from
Amusing Ourselves to Death
By
Neil Postman
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What you’ll learn
The late NYU professor Neil Postman examines the cultural
shift from the printed word to electronic media as the preferred form of
communication. More than another ‘TV will rot your brain’ diatribe, Amusing
Ourselves to Death delves into how we perceive and consume
information, formulate thoughts and arguments, and construct beliefs based
on the technology we use. This classic cautionary tale points out what we
are unknowingly sacrificing on the altar of entertainment. Not for the
faint of heart.
Read on for key insights from Amusing Ourselves to Death.
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1. Huxley’s Brave
New World has proven far more prophetic than Orwell’s 1984.
Just about everyone is familiar with George Orwell’s
dystopic novel 1984. It’s a thought experiment about what life
could be like under a repressive authoritarian regime that strictly censors
free speech, monitors its citizens’ opinions and bars their access to
information. In this world, people were imprisoned and tortured for the
subtlest whisper of dissent.
There was a collective sigh of relief when the year 1984
came and went, and dark repressive dictatorship seemed out of sight. But
there’s an older, more obscure dystopia that is equally disconcerting. In
1932, Aldous Huxley envisioned a Brave New World where people would not
fear punishment, but fear being deprived of pleasure. In this world, truth
would not be kept from citizens, but lost in the deluge of trivial facts
and opinions. No need to ban and confiscate books, as no one would want to
read them. This world wouldn’t need a Big Brother to deprive people of
their freedom, history, or wisdom. People would not be enslaved to the
state, but pathetically enslaved to self and its impulses. Given our
cultural trajectory, Huxley’s prediction appears to be the more accurate of
the two. The shift from a print-based culture to an image-based culture has
fueled our descent into mindless triviality.
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2. Primary
communication forms have shifted throughout human history from oral-based
to print-based to image-based.
For most of human history, people have relied on oral forms
of communication. Information about ancestors and traditions came through
village elders. Consider the Hebrews who faithfully told their
children the story of Yahweh’s delivering his people from Egyptian slavery,
or Homer, reciting Grecian histories of human and divine action to the next
generation. With the advent of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440,
however, the primary medium of communication gradually changed from the
spoken word to the printed word as written materials became more accessible.
Literacy rates rose rapidly during this time. The printed word would prove
foundational to the Enlightenment, facilitating rational, propositional
discourse in a way never before possible.
With the advent of electronic media—particularly the
television—came yet another monumental shift in the ways we communicate.
With this change in medium came change in the way we take in information
and form beliefs—and it was not a change for the better.
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3. The shift from
a word-based society to an image-based culture has led to endless
opportunities for miscommunication.
The forms of media we rely on to communicate are a matter of
great importance. Some media can facilitate meaningful, precise discourse
while others obscure the process of communication. For instance, what would
happen if people tried to engage in a rigorous debate using smoke signals?
It would be a slow, cumbersome process, full of ambiguity. In the
same way, it is also difficult to communicate meaning precisely through the
use of images. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but which
thousand words, exactly? If people were asked to choose a thousand words to
depict a scene (they’re not), the thousand words would vary dramatically.
Because the communication of those thousand words is implicit and not
explicit, however, people are left with vague gut-level intuitions that
they cannot express. This makes meaningful conversation and debate
extremely difficult. Words form concrete truth claims that can be assessed
and responded to with words. Arguing with images leads to ambiguities. It’s
not a fair fight, and it’s one that leads to everyone losing.
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4. Public
discourse has gradually devolved into show business, which poses dangers
for education and the free society.
Before television, there was no way to market anything like
the “news of the day.” There were no media that allowed snippets of events
of varying levels of significance to be ripped from their respective
contexts at jaw-dropping speeds. Cultures that still rely on smoke signals
as an efficient tool of communication will simply never have the “news of
the day” phenomenon. As the late media theorist Marshall McLuhan observed,
the medium is the message.
This means that the television is not simply a new
technology, but a new way of thinking and knowing. The forms of
communication generate the content of a culture. Image-driven forms of
communication will create an entirely different culture than word-driven
forms do—or did.
It would be wrong to say that television and electronic
media have brought no benefit. The power of images to stir emotion toward
noble causes like ending war and fighting racism, for instance, should not
be dismissed. This is a discussion of tradeoffs, not a blanket assault on
electronic media.
It is worth mentioning that this is not an elitist argument
against the junk on television. There is plenty of junk in print as well as
on television. The best measure of a culture is not its assortment of
frivolities, but what a culture finds most important. When a culture deems
frivolities important, that is problematic. As we get bombarded
with a large volume of random scraps of unrelated information, it becomes
increasingly difficult to differentiate between the frivolous and the
important, as news moves fluidly between political upheavals and celebrity
gossip.
This critique is more about epistemology (theory of
knowledge) than aesthetics. It’s about how certain media fail to help us
know, even as they presume to convey information fully and effectively. As
we transition from print-driven culture to image-driven culture, we become
increasingly trivial. The image-based way of knowing is doing more harm
than good. There are tradeoffs that come from any shift in communication
medium, but it is not always an even exchange. The change from books to
television has been unfavorable.
Print-based learning requires an ability to think abstractly
and logically. It trains the mind to follow a line of reasoning and engage
with ideas rather than passively consume them. It’s why asking, “Do I need
to draw you a picture?” is received as patronizing and insulting. The
implication is that the capacity to conceptualize and understand arguments
without relying on images is preferable.
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5. America was an
unbelievably literate culture through the late 1800s.
During the colonial era and through much of the 1800s,
America was a thoroughly typographic (i.e., print-oriented) culture. Not
only did colonial New England have the world’s highest literacy rates, they
actually made the most of their literacy: they read. A lot. Alexis de
Tocqueville and other observers of early America marveled that not just a
tiny intellectual elite but even the poorest farmhand could eloquently express
and defend his positions on political and spiritual topics.
Thomas Paine’s famous treatise Common Sense sold
over 100,000 copies in the two months following its publication in 1776.
Relative to the small population of colonists, this was a remarkable feat.
The only media event of comparable magnitude in modern America is the Super
Bowl, which draws in a similar proportion of the nation’s population. Which
society would be better equipped to articulate and defend its rights and
democratic institutions?
It was the centrality of the printed word that led to an
educated citizenry and robust public discourse. Television will not lead us
to either.
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6. The idea that
children can effectively learn through television is grossly mistaken.
Educators are obsessed with talk of “techniques,” the newer
implicitly accepted as the best. In this case, we see television
supplementing or even replacing the printed word as a means of conveying
information. Sesame Street as a perfect example of education—yet
another vital institution getting subsumed by entertainment.
Sesame Street was
a dream-come-true for parents and teachers. In a culture where children are
often viewed as annoyances, the show gave parents a reprieve from the
responsibility of caretaking and educating while alleviating them of any
sense of guilt because the show was educational. Teachers love Sesame
Street for similar reasons. Incorporating television into the
curriculum was a new (and therefore improved) technique. At home and in the
classroom, Sesame Street encourages a love of school and learning—or so
people thought (and probably still think). As it turns out, Sesame Street
teaches kids to expect fun from school, fun just like Sesame Street is fun.
Instead of learning about Mimi the Whale’s migration
patterns and the behavior of large oceanic mammals, the implicit message
communicated to children is that anything that is worth learning should
also be entertaining in the process. That education needs entertainment.
Reading books and interacting with peers and teachers are
active, engaging activities. Watching TV, by contrast, requires nothing
from the viewer: it is passive and it pacifies.
To be clear, Sesame Street is educational, but only in the
sense that any other show is educational: the viewer passively receives a
steady stream of information. The biggest problem with Sesame Street is
that it sells itself as a helpful aid to the classroom, when in fact it
encourages children to love television—not school.
The Television Age has not left the classroom untouched. Its
presence has weakened a longstanding connection between education and the
printed word. If a culture hacks at the print-based roots, it will end up
with a diminished, subpar yield of the fruits of a print-based education:
the ability to use logic, follow arguments, maintain focus required to
think critically, and, say, read a book. Not only has the television’s
advent begun the dissolution of the bond between education and the printed
word, it has also ushered in a new understanding of education itself, in
which education is a passive experience and teachers are stage performers,
charged with entertaining a crowd.
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7. Awareness about
the impact of different media on culture is our last fragile defense
against the Huxleyan future.
There are two paths that crush a culture’s spirit: the
Orwellian path of statist authoritarianism or the Huxleyan path of
Visigothic hedonism. There are reflections of the Orwellian vision that we
see in American culture, like prisons filled to overflowing at alarming
rates, but the 1984 narrative misses the mark at crucial
junctures. The suffocation of a society’s spirituality, for example, need
not come through outright suppression, as Orwell feared.
More than any other country in the world, the United States
has given us the clearest picture of what the Huxleyan nightmare could look
like. The Orwellian brand of bullying is easier to spot. When we hear the
clink of shackles and howls of pain from the oppressed, we still take up
the proud Enlightenment tradition of rebellion à la Bacon, Milton, Paine,
and Jefferson. But howls of laughter don’t strike us as oppression, and
thus rebellion seems unwarranted. To whom would one complain about weighty
political discourse devolving into punch lines and laughter? And so
amusement continues to be a high ideal, and television remains the
preferred vehicle for discourse, speeding forward at an alarming rate.
Intelligent, rational discourse about the subjects that matter most are
impossible via electronic, image-driven forms of communication.
It doesn’t seem like an ideology in its own right, and yet
it is, in that it shapes the way that we view and interact with the world:
the television paradigm insists on a particular way of life, particular
patterns in which people relate to each other and to ideas. It’s been a
cultural revolution without bloodshed, but it’s also occurred without any
debate. We Americans are all hopelessly Marxist in the sense that we all
intuitively believe that history is moving towards progress as a matter of
course and that technology is the conduit by which paradise on earth will
be ushered in.
The challenge here is that many people do not consider the
current state of affairs problematic. For those who do, there is the
additional challenge of finding a viable solution. The Luddite proposals
for getting rid of electronic media altogether are unfeasible and absurd.
The idea of a documentary series would dissolve into parody and
self-defeat.
Awareness is perhaps the best defense: knowledge that
image-based communication is an entirely different structure of
receiving meaning that ultimately corrodes our notions of political
discourse, religion, commerce, and quality news reporting.
Cultivating awareness must begin in the schools. Schools
must begin discussing and demystifying media, showing its effects on
individuals and a culture. It’s a long shot, but education is the best way
to outpace disaster. As Huxley pointed out, the problem is not in laughter
replacing thinking, but that we no longer know why we’re laughing or why
we’ve abandoned thinking.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Amusing
Ourselves to Death here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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