Amusing ourselves to death how many pages

That, in turn, forced our school curricula to become entertaining or it would lose kids' already TV-shortened attention span. The effect, he argues, is as degrading to education as TV news is to our national discourse. Once again, while I can see Dr.

Postman's point, my understanding is that "Sesame Street" was created to salvage learning after television had its negative effects. It may have been a concession to the problem, but it was not the cause of it. Also, I'm not entirely sure if our circumstances are quite as bleak as Dr. Postman made out. So if television dumbed us down, is the Internet, which requires some reading, smartening us back up? If Dr. Postman had lived, I think he would have been an author member.

So go ahead. Turn of your electronics and live in the moment. Our whole culture needs to unplug more often. Even Dr. Postman recognized that TV and computers weren't going away. Nov 29, Murtaza rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites. Well I wish I could explain how much I loved this book in a short paragraph but I don't feel that I would do it full justice.

A brilliant exposition of how new forms of information technology; without our consent or even active notice, have entirely rewired our culture. In effect, the explosion of visual media has made us demand everything from politics to religion to science be packaged as 'entertainment'. Correspondingly, it has led to the trivialization of all fields of human endeavor in the Well I wish I could explain how much I loved this book in a short paragraph but I don't feel that I would do it full justice.

Correspondingly, it has led to the trivialization of all fields of human endeavor in the eyes of the common person. It has made us a trivial, unserious people; the polar opposites of the learned and thoughtful ones who built the foundation of the rational societies we inhabit today.

We have effectively sacrificed rationality on the altar of enjoyment, and are merely presiding over a crumbling edifice of other peoples' good ideas. Having said all that, this is not a jeremiad. The author doesn't condescend or insult the reader's intelligence. In fact, for a book ostensibly meant to decry the displacement by entertainment of all other human pursuits, he subtly reveals that he's actually a hilarious writer.

I'm several decades late to this incredible book but it feels as relevant as it must have been then, perhaps even more so. Good thoughts, but I recall a comment to the effect that for every Amusing Ourselves -type book we read, we should read another book on God's marvelous gift of technology.

See here for Jacobs's assessment of why the Standard Critique of Technology has failed to change us. Mar 24, Abby rated it it was amazing Shelves: sociology , psychology , nonfiction , philosophy , the-internet. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Donald Trump is so purely a product and consequence of the Age of Television.

It is a gripping and somehow affirming read, backing up all that I have felt this year about wanting to get away from TV, Twitter and the rest of it. Surprised I had not heard of it till now; it reads quickly and is well worth your time. What remains to be seen is whether we can recover from our addiction to entertainment.

May 13, Erika RS rated it did not like it. This book makes two good points: the media used to communicate affects the nature of the communication, and much of modern communication on serious matters is frivolous. That covers the first part of the book. The rest is a tiresome rant about how TV is ruining us all.

The details of the rant are not worth covering, but I do think that Postman misses some important points. First, he never looks to see if there is any good in a visual based communication style. It is true, as he states, that a med This book makes two good points: the media used to communicate affects the nature of the communication, and much of modern communication on serious matters is frivolous. It is true, as he states, that a medium such as television emphasizes emotional impact over rational argument, but emotion can be a powerful motivator.

An image of the damage from an earthquake or a hurricane can inspire someone to help when a description of the damage may not. Even on a rational level, a picture can be worth a thousand words as anyone who has ever tried to learn knitting can tell you. Postman only gives the slightest of nods to the fact that textual communication can also be banal. See your favorite social network for more details. A better approach than Postman's, which declares that TV is bad and text is good, is to realize that different communication mediums have different strengths and weaknesses.

Television is excellent at providing entertainment, but that is not the only thing it is good for. No media should be the only mode of discourse. Ideally, they should be used to support and reinforce each other. Dec 30, Yevgeniy Brikman rated it it was amazing. 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. 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.

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.

All discourse, all discussion, all news, and just about everything else was done via print. It revealed the world line by line. It was arguably an entire society of well read and educated individuals. It's hard to square that image with the modern US! 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 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.

The US is now a society dominated by TV - This book was written in , 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. Different mediums—oratory, writing, TV—differ radically in how they prioritize and process information. 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. 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.

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. 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. The medium limits the message - The key insight is that none of these mediums permit anything outside of their core area of strength. Because everything on TV must be entertaining, it's a poor medium to use for all of our public discourse! News, politics, education, and everything else TV touches are being turned into show business, and that's not a good thing. 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 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. The most important thing is not what a politician does, but how they look while doing it. Instead of the 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.

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.

Other forms of media are copying TV - Not in the book, as it was published in , but my own personal observation is that the Internet has inherited many of the properties of TV, and made many of them worse. The websites that win are not those that inform or provide value, but those that entertain the most. We went from 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. We no longer debate issues.

We're no longer informed. We just seek out amusement. What can we do about it? 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. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images.

They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials. 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. 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?

Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. This felt pedantic and dated and messy to me. Although I generally agree that TV can be bubblegum for the brain, I don't think he convincingly proved that it is fundamentally more pernicious than other media. With "creative non-fiction" even books on serious topics now are more entertainment than education of the electorate, so the "medium is the message" doesn't quite cover it.

And he's saying newspapers were already ruined by the telegraph anyway. Also, the Lincoln-Douglass debates were a show This felt pedantic and dated and messy to me. Also, the Lincoln-Douglass debates were a show as he describes them, so entertainment value per se is not really the problem anyway.

Any type of information from town cryer to Internet can be corrupted or infantilized. What would be more interesting is a look across countries or across geographical units in the US at the same time to see where people are more likely to vote, to be engaged, to be informed with accurate facts, etc.

Mar 06, Michael Perkins rated it it was amazing. May 01, Mehrsa rated it it was amazing. I cannot think of a book that explains our recent election cycle or our current cultural malaise better than this one. Even though he ends by saying essentially that computer technology is not likely to make an impact on our culture, his ideas on the medium his focus is on TV changing thought, culture, and dialogue is dead on.

I found this book to be remarkably accurate in its foresight even though it must I cannot think of a book that explains our recent election cycle or our current cultural malaise better than this one.

I found this book to be remarkably accurate in its foresight even though it must have been read during the time it was written as pure crank-ery. Postman is a great writer and thinker. View 1 comment. Dec 03, Ivan rated it it was amazing Shelves: sociology-culture , technology-and-social-media. The book is tightly argued and convincing. Even though the focus is on modern-day TV and entertainment in news, politics, religion , the book is laden with timeless wisdom.

I especially appreciated the panoramic view of the centuries; how technology is never neutral but has a built-in ideology; and how a word-centric culture is superior to one that is image-centric. A profound and relevant book. It's still going to be one more nuanced review about the book that talked about the perils of show business and utilizing televised knowledge back in but still relevant to this very day. The book, which is brief has around pages, mainly consists of two sections.

The first section reflects upon the ways by which people got informed since the remembered timeline starting from Socrates' trial and stopping before the advent of Television which became prominent around the mid-late 20th centur It's still going to be one more nuanced review about the book that talked about the perils of show business and utilizing televised knowledge back in but still relevant to this very day.

The first section reflects upon the ways by which people got informed since the remembered timeline starting from Socrates' trial and stopping before the advent of Television which became prominent around the mid-late 20th century.

Things such as the use of language and correlating it with the ability to think and imagine, a brief histories of various forms of the sources of knowledge and concentrating a bit further upon background of typography, then telegraphic and telephonic sources as well. The second section of the book deals much with analysis of then contemporary news and other tv shows. It also showered the role of television in changing the views of Religion, Education, Economy, Image Politics.

In my opinion, the first portion of the book is spellbinding comparing with the latter part. It doesn't mean to be boring but the familiarity of the subject from past personal learnings.

The ways in which the TV news networks hinders the ability of people to think broader as Postman records, "TV news has no intention of suggesting that any story has any implications, for that would require viewers to continue to think about it when it is done and therefore obstruct their attending to the next story that waits panting in the air.

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. It's one of the very few books that's really needs to be read by everyone for the sake of original thinking.

I can only wish I had read it sooner. View all 5 comments. Readers also enjoyed. About Neil Postman. Neil Postman. Neil Postman , an important American educator, media theorist and cultural critic was probably best known for his popular book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Shuffle Off to Bethlehem 9. Reach Out and Elect Someone Teaching as an Amusing Activity Start earning points for buying books!

Uplift Native American Stories. Add to Bookshelf. Dec 27, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Paperback —. About Amusing Ourselves to Death What happens when media and politics become forms of entertainment? Also by Neil Postman. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Chuck Klosterman.

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