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Rating:  -
The medium does not just alter the message but transforms the way we think. The alphabet rendered oral tradition obsolete and the printing press brought literacy to the masses. With the rise of the "Idiot Box" Postman sees the end of linear thinking. Politics, religion, and education are either entertainment or irrelevant. In 1985 Postman wrote this book with the thesis that Huxley was right and Orwell wrong.
Postman seems clearly annoyed with the fact that an actor was the POTUS and felt warnings should be played before political advertisements. Today we have candidates solemnly endorsing the message but it's clear the process has only accelerated since 1985. The wolves are circling and it's rational thinking which is the victims.
However, Postman didn't see the rise of the Internet. Most information is conveyed by the written word and if you avoid the "MSN: How you can tell if you Love your job" quizzes there is a wealth of "information." Postman realizes something is lost in the electronic transmission of information but he doesn't know quite what.
So what alternative does Postman offer to counter the harmful effects of mindless entertainment? He seems puzzled and doesn't think banning TV is realistic. Neither do I and I realize my love of prank phone calls fits right into his thesis. He feels TV is at its most dangerous when it pretends to educate and inform when major studies have found that people remember little from the nightly news. He thinks TV should be made as mind-numbingly stupid as possible and stop pretending images of wolves and babies can inform us about what's going on in the world. Leave television to entertainment.
I'd be curious to see if he still thinks the computer is a "toy" and what he thinks of the never ending streams of information from the Internet.
Otherwise I enjoyed reading this book and had fun writing about it on here. Everyone wants their voice heard. The Internet is replacing TV as the medium and that will change the way we think too.
Rating:  -
Along with Allan Bloom ("The Closing of the American Mind") this is a book I often bring up in class to discuss the "bad" effects of modern media. I also discuss Dr. Stafford's "Good Looking" to present the contrary argument. It certainly seems clear that it is worth considering contemporary learning and thinking to be different in some ways from a "text-based" society. Where we might have issues is over what differences are good and what bad, what differences are necessary for new cohorts to survive in an Information age, and what differences are clearly going to be missed because of the quality of life possible with them and not possible without them.
This book is short and easy as all of Postman's books that I have read so far, and so a good text even for those students who are less likely to read a text. Even if you can't get them to read it, many of the points are easy to bring up in discussion and they are points young people are very defensive about.
Rating: -
(...)
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.
Rating: -
Borrowing from Marshall McLuhan, Communication Arts professor Neil Postman adopts the thesis that the `medium is the metaphor' by arguing that "each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, expression, and sensibility" (10). McLuhan argued that the medium is the message; Postman carries it one step further by demonstrating that the `medium is the metaphor." He illustrates this by showing how the Cherokee Indians would communicate to multiple peoples separated by distance via smoke signals. While not knowing the nature of the discourse, Postman draws the inference that it probably did not contain philosophical argumentation because you cannot use smoke to do philosophy. The metaphor's form excludes the content (7). Postman illustrates this in the negative using the second commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing in heaven above, in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth. Wondering why God would make such a decree, Postman infers, "it is a strange injunction [second commandment] to include in part of one's ethical system unless its author assume a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture" (9, emphasis his).
This book is more relavant today than when it was first written. I live in a dorm and see people wasting their brains on video games (which I deem more dangerous than television). By the way, and I do not know how many reviewers caught this, Postman is not categorically bashing television. He notes how this has been a blessing in the lives of the elderly and the infirm. I thought this was a master stroke of sympathy and I commend him for it.
Rating: -
Most educated members of society have long recognized the danger of television. The cover of this book is a powerful image to illustrate the problem. Neil Postman takes a disturbing look at the social effects of television in "Amusing Ourselves to Death". While I may not agree with all of Postman's arguments, the book is able to make a strong statement about the dangers of television.
My biggest objection to the book is the way Postman chooses to introduce his agrument against the televised media. He uses the novels "1984" and "Brave New World" as a backdrop for the his explanation of how American society become so listless and lethargic. A major rule I learned in undergraduate English was that you can not use fiction to support an argument. The idea in itself is absurd. It would be like using an episode of Star Trek to rationalize what kind of car you should buy. Once I got past this imperfection in the book, I found the author's statement to be reasonably solid.
The basic idea discussed in this book is that when people learned by listening to teachers who accumulated knowledge, people were better learners. This is because the learner had to assimilate the knowledge into their brain and could ask questions to help the learning process. The written word and later the typed word made the learner think as he/she read. This learned a high level brain function. Nevertheless, people were learning. Television is a low level brain activity, which means people are less likely to learn as they watch. Television is often the most significant teacher a child has since the mid 20th century. Yet television's goal is not to educate but to entertain. Even educational programs like "Sesame Street" are flashy and structured like a series of comercials. It is no surprise that children are not learning in school when teachers can never be as flashy as television.
Postman looks at education, televangelism, and the news media in the book. He demonstrates how televised media has degraded each of these facets of American life. His attention to the lack of real learning from the news is particularly disturbing. The only time I can think of when news was not flashy and meant to be entertaining was on September 11, 2001. This should make the reader seriously question the news programs he/she watches.
While Postman lacks a real solution to the problem, I feel this is excusable when we consider television's stranglehold on society. The only way around the problem is to be educated to know how to watch television.
This is a disturbingly good read. It will be particularly appreciated by the minority who never or rarely turn on their television because of the poisonous venom it spews.
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