Review: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Powerful, important, everyone-must-read book.

The premise: the US has shifted from a society dominated by print (“the age of exposition”) to a society dominated by TV (“the age of show business”), and the result has profoundly degraded politics, news, and all forms of public discourse. I had previously been skeptical of the “TV will destroy society” arguments, but after reading this book, there’s really no doubt: society has changed, dramatically, and many of the problems we’re seeing today (e.g., Brexit, Trump) are the direct consequence of TV.

Some of the key insights for me from this book:

1. The US used to be a society dominated by print and perhaps one of the most literate societies in history.

• In the 18th century, something like 90% of men and 80% of women in the US were literate, which was an astonishingly high percentage for that era.
• The US was dominated by print. Popular books reached a huge percentage of the population; newspapers were incredibly widespread; pamphlets were printed and circulated to spread news with astonishing speed; libraries sprang up all over the country; lecture halls, which held public readings of books and articles, sprang up too; even religious debates were done in writing and through careful reasoning (in fact, churches laid the foundations for most US education—hard to square that now with the way the church treats science).
• The point of education at the time was mainly to read, as reading was the main way to participate in society back then. All discourse, all discussion, all news, and just about everything else was done via print. The printed word was most people’s connection to, and model of, the world. It revealed the world line by line.
• America was founded by a group of very well read and educated intellectuals. It was arguably an entire society of well read and educated individuals. It’s hard to square that image with the modern US!
• The format of political debates of the era was also print. This included both articles/essays published by the candidates (e.g., The Federalist Papers) as well as oral debates, where candidates would present their arguments by reading essays aloud to the audience (i.e., the oratory of the day was mostly done in a print style). In fact, the format of oral debates of that era is incredibly revealing: when Lincoln and Douglas had a debate, each candidate got 3 hours to present their arguments and 30 minutes for rebuttals, for a total debate time of 7-8 hours! This was not an unusual length for a debate of that era; the audience would stay for it all and participate regularly with cheers, applause, shouts of encouragement, etc. I can’t imagine a modern audience having the attention span for anything anywhere near that long.

2. The US is now a society dominated by TV

• This book was written in 1985, and even back then, just about every household had a TV and it had replaced print as the main source of news, politics, and public discourse.
• Since then, the situation has gotten worse: the average American household has multiple TVs (with far more channels), spends hours per day watching, and does very little reading.

3. Different mediums—oratory, writing, TV—differ radically in how they prioritize and process information.

• Oratory: the most important things are memory and eloquence. Memorizing stories, proverbs, and sayings was highly valued, as you would make decisions on new situations by pattern matching them to situations you remembered from the past. And since all discussion was done in person, the way to succeed was through eloquence, passion, and emotion.
• Writing: the most important thing is creating a logical, rational argument. Memory is less important, as writing can store knowledge permanently, so you can always look things up; eloquence and emotion are less important, as when you’re writing, the audience is invisible and imaginary. What matters with writing is grappling with ideas, reasoning skills, and logically ordered arguments: the author is forced to struggle intellectually to say something of meaning and the reader is forced to struggle intellectually to understand what was written and agree with or refute it. It’s no coincidence that the rise of print happened at the same time as the rise of the age of reason. Moreover, the written word is typically better evidence for something (e.g., when doing research) than oratory, as most writing has gone through far more thought, editing, and reviewing before it reaches the world.
• TV: the most important thing is that what you’re seeing is entertaining. Whereas reading requires your complete and active attention, TV is a more passive medium, where you’re often doing other things at the same time (e.g., eating, cleaning, chatting with others) and you can change the channel at any time. As a result, the only TV that gets watched is the kind of TV that can grab your attention amidst all the noise, so it’s all about spectacle, simple messages, no pre-requisites, and lots of bright lights and loud noises. In other words, it’s all about show business.

4. The medium limits the message

• The key insight is that none of these mediums permit anything outside of their core area of strength.
• Oral discussions that aren’t eloquent or don’t resonate emotionally don’t work.
• Writing without a central, logical argument doesn’t work
• TV that isn’t entertaining doesn’t work.
• For example, you won’t see long oral debates (e.g., like the 8-hour Douglas/Lincoln debate) or complicated arguments on TV (e.g., like the contents of this book); those are just too boring.
• In other words, the problem isn’t that TV is entertaining, but that everything on TV must be entertaining.

5. Because everything on TV must be entertaining, it’s a poor medium to use for all of our public discourse!

• TV is transforming our entire culture into one of show business and entertainment. News, politics, education, and everything else TV touches are being turned into show business, and that’s not a good thing.

• News: the primary requirement of TV news is not that it’s informative, but that it’s entertaining. We get beautiful, professional news anchors in the foreground; mood-setting music in the background; a barrage of news in the form of tiny, disconnected, bite-size segments (“and now this…”) in the middle; and in between these segments, we get ads. The result is that we are taught not to take the news seriously: that horrible school shooting you just heard about must not be so bad, as 30 seconds later, you jump to a story about puppies, and 30 seconds after that, a fun advertisement for beer. It’s not serious news and debate, but a spectacle. You’re not informed, but entertained. In fact, it’s worse: you’re misinformed. Before TV (actually, before the telegraph), information could travel no faster than a person, or about 35mph. As a result, most news was local, had a direct impact on your life, and was actionable. Nowadays, news travels at the speed of light, and you get news from all over the world, most of which has no impact on you (seriously, when is the last time a news story made you change your daily plan?). Instead of information that has an impact on your decision making, you’re bombarded with irrelevant trivia that drowns out everything else. Moreover, since each news fragment lives in a separate context, it’s as if each one is a separate reality: a politician can say one thing here and a completely contradictory thing there, and as there is no logical connection between them (unlike in writing, where everything must be logically connected), we’re somehow OK with it. That’s how Brexit and Trump happened.

• Politics: politics has shifted from a debate over policies (in the form of written essays and articles) to pure entertainment. The most important thing is not what a politician does, but how they look while doing it. Instead of the 7-8 hour debates of the 18th century, modern debates give candidates just a couple minutes each, which isn’t enough time to make any reasonable argument, and therefore turns modern politics into a series of sound bites, one-liners, and an obsession with looks and appearances. The first 15 presidents of the United States could’ve walked down the street and been completely unrecognized: in their time, they were known solely for their arguments and policies, as delivered through their writing. On the other hand, all modern presidential candidates must be celebrities, and are known for their looks and demeanor, as delivered through TV. Trump, for example, was elected primarily because he was entertaining.

• Education: TV is particularly ineffective for education. Anything taught via TV must be (a) entertaining¬†and (b) visual. But in the real world, not all learning is fun, and many types of learning require tests, long-form exposition, equations, and other non-visual formats that don’t work on TV. Sesame Street pretends to be an ally of schools and education, but rather than teaching kids to love learning, all it really does is teach kids to love TV. And after seeing TV education, normal schooling seems boring and inferior.

6. Other forms of media are copying TV

• Not in the book, as it was published in 1985, but my own personal observation is that the Internet has inherited many of the properties of TV, and made many of them worse.
• We get even more information, even faster, that has little to no bearing on our life.
• Instead of 100 channels, we have billions of websites, so the battle for attention is even more intense. The websites that win are not those that inform or provide value, but those that entertain the most.
• Attention span has gotten even shorter. We went from 7-8 hour debates in the age of writing, to 1-hour debates in the age of TV, to 3-second tweets in the age of the Internet.
• As a result of all of this, public discourse is broken. We no longer debate issues. We’re no longer informed. We just seek out amusement.
• It’s devastating and depressing. What can we do about it?

Quotes

I’ve saved some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information–misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information–information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

“It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.”

“A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is 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.”

Honestly, I wanted to quote the whole damn book. See https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2337731-amusing-ourselves-to-death-public-discourse-in-the-age-of-show-business for lots more.

Rating: 5 stars