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Title: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman ISBN: 0-14-009438-5 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.27 (77 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A much needed exploration into the philosophy of media
Comment: Occasionally one stumbles across a work which perfectly summarizes an era. For example, we hail the muckracker novels, primarily "The Jungle," as a brilliant picture of the late 19th century in America; likewise, any Jonathan Edwards sermon captures the essence of Puritan New England. But Neil Postman, in "Amusing Ourselves to Death," has created not a picture, but an exposition of the state of America today. That it is an expostion, is extremely important.
Postman's thesis in this brief but articulate book consists of two tenets: (1) The form of communication, to some extent, determines (or is biased toward certain types of) content; (2) Television, as our modern-day uber-form of communication, has biases which are destructive toward the rational mind. TV teaches us to expect life to be entertaining, rather than interesting; it teaches us to expect 8-minute durations of anything and everything (anything else is beyond our attention span); it teach us to be suspicious of argument and discussion, and instead to accept facts at face value.
Furthermore - and, by far, the most important discovery Postman makes in this book - TV teaches us to live a decontextualized life. Just as a TV program has nothing to do with anything before or after it, nor the commericals inside it, we learn to view life as a series of unconnected, random events which are entertaining at best, and bear no significance toward any larger picture.
As a culture, America has lost its ability to integrate experiences into a larger whole; and Postman's explaination for part (not all) of this problem's development makes perfect sense. It certainly is true that the vast majority of Americans are perfectly happy not to develop any sort of framework or philosophy; life is simply life, and one doesn't need to consider it.
Even today's elite students, who are certainly able to integrate lessons and perform well academically, have fallen to this malady; as David Brooks pointed out in his searingly accurate article, "The Organization Kid," (Atlantic Monthly, April 2001) top-notch students no longer attempt to build any sort of moral or philosophical structure from their studies; a life lived in a context, makes no sense to the student who has grown up watching the decontextualized television screen.
It is extremely important that today's Americans take a close look at just what effects the television has had on themselves and their children; Postman's work is dead on target. We have moved, as a nation, from those who seek entertainment as a means to an end (most particularly, rest between productive work), to those who seek entertainment as an end in itself. And, as Huxley realized in Brave New World, this is the undoing of Western civilization - a prosaic fade away into an entertained oblivion. Or, as T.S. Eliot put it in "The Hollow Men," "This is the way the world ends/ not with a bang but a whimper."
Rating: 5
Summary: Dated Nature Enhances the Point
Comment: This book is seventeen years out of date as I write this, which is ancient history in the modern media. There are references to TV shows, political scandals, and personalities that the current generation of TV-raised children won't even recognize. To many of our jaded citizens today, this book might as well have been written in the late Cretaceous era.
And yet, somehow, that age helps to increase the book's appeal. Neil Postman, who acknowledges his debt to Marshall McLuhan, isn't just another pathetic Jeremiah wailing against the woes of this earth; his dark predictions have been proven true by the passage of the years. Indeed, as he wrote before the Internet became a mass medium, he seems at times far too conservative.
If you've gotten this far into a review of this book, chances are you've already come to the conclusion that TV is a destructive influence. It's hard to live in this world and not recognize this fact; but anyone who doesn't already think so isn't likely to show this much interest. What this book offers is a point-by-point examination of exactly what losses we've suffered, and ultimately a cool consideration of why we probably can't regain what we've lost.
Because most of us don't have the connections or the research time Postman does, we don't know the half of how bad our society has become as a result of TV and its connected media. Postman is able to explain it to us. The effects on our political arena, our religious life, our interpersonal relationships, and the education of our children are so deeply sunk into the fabric of our culture, Postman suggests, that the damage cannot now be undone. We will continue on our current destructive path because people won't get off unless they want to, and TV has the effect of not making people want to get off. ...
This book won't help you stave off the death slide. It's doubtful anything can. But it will help you understand, as the world goes to hell around you, how we got on this track, and understanding why we're all damned is better than nothing.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Epistemology of Media
Comment: (...)
I think author Neil Postman has a lot of valuable things to say and reflect on. Several years ago I read his book Technopoly, which, along with several other books and articles I read at the time, led me to present a session at the 2001 TCEA convention entitled, "Remember the Luddites: Asking Critical Questions about Educational Technology." Technopoly was published in 1993, but now I have gone back to Postman's 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death. It seems a bit dated, with the advent of the Internet and all the changes which have come as a result, but I found the book to be none-the-less quite relevant and worthwhile. His overall theme of how our society (esp in the US) is tending to become more and more focused on entertainment via multimedia has many implications not only in an educational arena, but also for everyday life-- in the way we set our priorities, and in the final analysis-- the ways we choose (hopefully intentionally) to spend our limited heartbeats. Those small choices day to day add up to have a considerably dramatic cumulative effect. And his point is well taken about our typical, cultural LACK of intentionality when it comes to our consumption of multimedia content-- esp. television programming.
In the May 2004 edition of Wired magazine, an article entitled "Watch This Way" documents a conversation between various moguls and pundits of our ever-growing entertainment industry. I found Yair Landau of Sony Picture's comment that "There are three basic human entertainment experiences that go back to the cave: storytelling, game-playing, and music" to be compelling. Author William Gibson added to this list of basic entertainment experiences "being part of the tribe." I have been giving a fair amount of thought lately to the value and opportunities posed by digital storytelling authoring tools in the early 21st Century. Most of my thinking along these lines is very optimistic and energetic, but it is good to temper this enthusiasm with some sober analysis like Postman's. I wouldn't call this blog entry a book-review per se-- I more think of it as a few reflections about some key points Postman makes in the book that I would like to remember and others may find worthwhile as well. As Landau pointed out, the desire to seek entertainment through storytelling and music is most likely universal. These are drives which transcend time and space. I am reminded of the futurists in the early part of the twentieth century (I think) who predicted that technology would lead to vast amounts of leisure time for people: with washing machines, dishwashers, and speedy cooking devices, people would have loads of free time to pursue other activities which were unthinkable in earlier times. I have laughed at that seemingly ridiculous prediction in the past, because today in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we seem to generally be harried, stressed, busy people who do not have enough time in the day for all the activities and demands which fill our schedules and minds. Yet despite all this busyness, we are clearly still finding large amounts of time to spend watching TV and entertaining ourselves in other ways. According to the Wired article previously cited, more and more Americans are watching LESS television today, but spending more time playing electronic games and surfing the Internet. That was not a trendline predicted by Postman in 1984. But we shouldn't be too hard on him for that oversight, Bill Gates apparently didn't see the Internet coming either. Despite this fact, Postman's analysis about our apparent intrinsic drive to seek entertainment via multimedia is still a cogent thesis for 21st century netizens.
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Title: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman ISBN: 0679745408 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 April, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman ISBN: 0679751661 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman ISBN: 0385290098 Publisher: Delta Pub. Date: 01 September, 1971 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School by Neil Postman ISBN: 0679750312 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: How to Watch TV News by Neil Postman, Steve Powers ISBN: 0140132317 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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