Overall Summary: In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman opens by saying that Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in his book Brave New World is one we should pay close attention to. Unlike George Orwell’s novel 1984, where government overreach is responsible for the death of free speech and thought, Huxley foresaw that entertainment would be our downfall.
The author continues to build off the work of Marshall McLuhan, who argued that “the medium is the message,” and expands on his theory. The form of a medium determines its content, or what we get out of it, which is why it’s important for us to be conscious of how we use media.
In the past, discourse was more rational because it was based on print. Print is a rational form of communication; therefore, people who used it were more rational. However, with the invention of telegraphy and photography came new ways to communicate ideas. These methods are not as effective at conveying information as print since they lack context and can be decontextualized. This leads to television being dominant in society today because it’s an entertainment medium that presents all information in an entertaining way. People no longer have time for complex debate or deep thought due to this media saturation.
Postman believes that television should not be eradicated, but rather it should be used responsibly. He says that we can save ourselves by becoming aware of the potential television has to permanently stymie rational discussion. Once we realize this power, we will resist the urge to “entertain ourselves to death.”
Foreward: Postman begins his book by summarizing George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel 1984, as well as Aldous Huxley’s (also dystopian) 1932 novel Brave New World. Both of these authors predicted a future that was grim and oppressive, but they didn’t predict the same thing. Orwell feared that we would be oppressed by external forces such as governmental control. Huxley feared that our internal weaknesses and desires to be entertained would make us lazy, stupid, and intellectually incompetent. In short, Postman says that “Orwell feared what we hate will ruin us; Huxley feared what we love will ruin us.”
Chapter 1: In the first section of this chapter, Postman writes about various examples that demonstrate how Americans have become increasingly superficial thinkers. Politicians are praised for their looks or physique on TV and in print media. We’ve developed shorter attention spans because of our exposure to fast-paced television news shows. Advertisers prey on our desire for entertainment by making us hungry for short quips rather than substantive information and knowledge.
Postman acknowledges that this is a well-known phenomenon, but he argues that we haven’t taken it far enough. The relationship between form and content in public discourse has led to the decline of our culture. We need to keep in mind how important media are for our society’s development. For example, without technologies like photography and television, politicians’ or reporters’ appearances wouldn’t be as influential on the general population because they would reach fewer people. Therefore, conversations about appearance wouldn’t exist either if these technologies didn’t exist.
In this passage, the author is quoting Marshall McLuhan. He says that the medium of a message (such as television) is not just the physical form of it, but also its content. Postman disagrees with him and says that the media are metaphors for ideas or concepts.
New technologies can have an effect on our culture. For example, the invention of eyeglasses has led to a new way of thinking about the human body and how it can be improved through science. Microscopes have also had an influence because they allow us to see things that we cannot normally see with our eyes. In addition, Postman says that metaphors are created by media such as language or technology, so when we come up with new ways of communicating ideas, this leads to a change in society’s content—in other words, what people think about themselves and their world.
https://www.allencheng.com/amusing-ourselves-to-death-summary/
Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment.
The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the quality of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.
Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and "talking hairdos" bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate's ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication, instead of the traditional "the end".
Postman refers to the inability to act upon much of the so-called information from televised sources as the information-action ratio. He contends that "television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".
Drawing on the ideas of media scholar Marshall McLuhan – altering McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message" to "the medium is the metaphor" – he describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and prioritization of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a different kind of knowledge. The faculties requisite for rational inquiry are simply weakened by televised viewing. Accordingly, reading, a prime example cited by Postman, exacts intense intellectual involvement, at once interactive and dialectical; whereas television only requires passive involvement.
Postman argues that commercial television has become derivative of advertising. Moreover, modern television commercials are not "a series of testable, logically ordered assertions" rationalizing consumer decisions, but "is a drama—a mythology, if you will—of handsome people" being driven to "near ecstasy by their good fortune" of possessing advertised goods or services. "The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue" because more often than not "no claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama." Because commercial television is programmed according to ratings, its content is determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television in its present state, he says, does not satisfy the conditions for honest intellectual involvement and rational argument.
He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Plato, of course, was thinking about the transition from speech to print. For centuries, before the invention of print, knowledge was passed down by an oral tradition. The shift to print changed what could be communicated, how much of it could be communicated, what it would be used for — everything about communication.
https://jacklule.medium.com/on-amusing-ourselves-to-death-chapter-1
We Are Still Amusing Ourselves to Death—35 Years Later
Advent of the Entertainment Culture
When Postman’s classic lament for the loss of our print culture was written in 1985, the Big Three networks dominated. Pac-Man was five years old. USA Today was three. The Mac computer was one. Cable TV was in its infancy. Google was 12 years into the future. Netflix wouldn’t open for business for 14 years. We’d have to wait 22 years for the iPhone and Kindle. Though television is not the force it once was, his critique remains as potent as ever.
In Colonial America, before the advent of the entertainment culture, life was different. Reading, Postman tells us, was “not an elitist activity, and printed matter was spread evenly among all kinds of people”—except, of course, for slaves. People were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets they hardly had time for books. But books also got their share of attention. Common Sense by Thomas Paine, for example, would have sold the equivalent of 33 million copies in today’s America. More than that, libraries and lecture halls multiplied.
Why were farmers and merchants able to follow the involved arguments and elaborate sentences of Lincoln and Douglas (who spoke for three and four hours at a time per debater)? Because the audience was imbued with a print culture. Even the way Americans talked betrayed this. Tocqueville wrote, “An American cannot converse, but he can discuss. . . . He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting.” Why? Their minds and speech were shaped by print.
In contrast, our civic life has become consumed by soundbites and Twitter feeds. Even those outlets that are supposed to be providing substance do not. Despite appearances, Fox News and MSNBC have much in common. Neither is primarily concerned with informing the public. Both are in the entertainment business. Both are primarily concerned with getting as many people to watch as possible so they can make as much money as possible—and that is done through entertainment. Want proof? Just look at the Nielsen Ratings for both of them compared to C-SPAN.
Our civic life has become consumed by soundbites and Twitter feeds.
You don’t have to be Marshall McLuhan to recognize how far public discourse has declined even from 35 years ago. Presidential debates are unwatchable as candidates talk over each other. Politicians seem more like stand-up comedians, roaming the stage with handheld mics and giving cynical one-liners rather than offering vision or well-considered policy proposals. When did you last hear a candidate seek to thoughtfully persuade a broad range of listeners rather than merely rally the base by insulting opponents and offering half-truths?
Reshaping Our Public Discourse
This is the core of Postman’s distress. The loss of a print culture didn’t grieve him most. It was the demise of public discourse.
We’ve ceased to be a deliberative culture, having become obsessed with minutiae and irrelevancies instead. Postman traces the origins of this back to the mid-19th century and the introduction of the telegraph. Now, news can come instantly from all over the world to populate the pages of newspapers. A royal marriage in Japan, the death of an opera star in Brazil, a financial scandal in England, a famine in Turkey.
What could be the harm of this? “The contribution of the telegraph to public discourse,” Postman wrote, “was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence.” What difference would any of these make in the daily life of average readers? And what could one do about any of these anyway?
The loss of a print culture didn’t grieve Postman most. It was the demise of public discourse.
Even more troubling, the telegraph presented these isolated factoids without context, without analysis, without perspective. It “made public discourse essentially incoherent.” Now multiply the telegraph by Twitter. That is the essence of our entertainment news culture.
Today, I think, Postman would go further. We have also lost the ability to persuade. Persuasion has a bad name because of its associations with manipulation. And our relativistic culture has made persuasion impolite at best. After all, everyone deserves to have an opinion unsullied by logic or fact or experience.
Even those who love books have difficulty (OK, I have difficulty) talking to people I disagree with in an honest, civil, reasoned manner. I find it challenging to give a fair statement of, and the strongest reasons supporting, perspectives I oppose. Somehow I gravitate to straw men and lean all too heavily on the one-liner.
If principled persuasion is banned or simply falls out of use, however, how can we convey our perspective? Many seem to be following the tongue-in-cheek advice credited to Carl Sandburg: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” Without persuasion our only alternatives for influencing others are anger, coercion, and violence.
No Easy Solutions...
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman: Summary and Lessons
“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”
Table of Contents
- Amusing Ourselves to Death - Short Summary
- Lessons
- The Medium Is the Metaphor
- Media as Epistemology
- Typographic America
- The Typographic Mind
- The Peek-a-Boo World
- 1. Irrelevance
- 2. Impotence
- 3. Incoherence
- The Age of Show Business
- “Now … This”
- Reach Out and Elect Someone
- Teaching as an Amusing Activity
- The Huxleyan Warning
Amusing Ourselves to Death - Short Summary
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman shows how the most popular media of a time in history shapes the discourse of the world. Written in 1985, it focuses on how television has negatively affected the level of public communication in contemporary America but it’s even more relevant today in the internet era.
Lessons
There are two literary dystopic visions:
- George Orwell, who in “1984” warned about a tyrannical state that would ban information to keep the public powerless
- Aldous Huxley, who in “Brave New World” depicted a population too amused by distractions – entertainment, leisure, and laughter – to realize that they had been made powerless
Postman believes that the communication inspired by television has turned our world into a more Huxleyan one.
“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.”
The Medium Is the Metaphor
Politics, religion, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business. America favors all those who possess both a talent and a format to amuse. As a result, we as people are on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. New technology introduced new forms of communication:
“This idea – that there is a content called “the news of the day” – was entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It is quite, precisely, a media event. We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation.”
Although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication. Each medium creates a unique mode of communication by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Communication on television is largely done in images, not words. The medium is the message. We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as “it” is but only as our languages are. Languages are our media, the metaphors that create the content of our culture.
Media as Epistemology
Postman raises no objection to television’s junk, rather it’s the best part of TV. The problem is when television presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations:
“We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.”
The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. The truth must be presented in a certain clothing or it’s not acknowledged. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant. Truth is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.
“As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.”
Since intelligence is primarily defined as one’s capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication. A major new medium changes the structure of communication by creating new forms of truth-telling. While some old media do, in fact, disappear, other forms of conversation – speech and writing, for example – will always remain. Thus the epistemology of new forms such as television does not have an entirely unchallenged influence.
“We have reached, however, a critical mass in that electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word.”
A television-based epistemology does not pollute everything, but rather public communication – our political, religious, informational, and commercial forms of conversation – and its surrounding landscape.
Typographic America
The influence of the printed word in every area of public communication was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of its monopoly. If you wanted to exchange ideas, you did so in a pamphlet, a debate forum, or a lecture. These were all places where the form of printed language lent itself to a more sophisticated and elegant content. Lectures and debates didn’t sound like idle conversation—they sounded like writing. Spoken sentences were longer, more complex, and more rigorously logical—and listeners, whose minds were used to this kind of print-based language, were able to digest and follow this kind of spoken print.
The Typographic Mind
In the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, people’s attention span and capacity to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences would have been extraordinary by current standards. At that time, America was in the middle years of its most glorious literary outpouring.
“One must begin, I think, by pointing to the obvious fact that the written word, and an oratory based upon it, has a content: a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content. This may sound odd, but since I shall be arguing soon enough that much of our discourse today has only a marginal propositional content, I must stress the point here. Whenever language is the principal medium of communication—especially language controlled by the rigors of print—an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result. The idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument guiding one’s thought.”
In a culture dominated by print, communication follows a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The definition of intelligence gives priority to the objective, rational use of the mind. At the same time, it encourages forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. The printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect, as there were no other means to have access to public knowledge.
“For two centuries, America declared its intentions, expressed its ideology, designed its laws, sold its products, created its literature and addressed its deities with black squiggles on white paper. It did its talking in typography, and with that as the main feature of its symbolic environment rose to prominence in world civilization.”
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, print began to show the early signs of its replacement. Its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business.
The Peek-a-Boo World
Toward the middle years of the nineteenth century, two ideas came together whose convergence provided twentieth-century America with a new metaphor of public discourse. Their partnership overwhelmed the Age of Exposition, and laid the foundation for the Age of Show Business. In the middle of the 19th century, two ideas laid the foundation for the Age of Show Business:
- Transportation and communication are disengaged from each other
- Space was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information
The solution to these problems was electricity. The telegraph wrapped the continent in an information grid and created the possibility of a unified American discourse. The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of communication:
1. Irrelevance
The value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning
“As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded.”
Daily news give us something to talk about but do not lead to any meaningful action. With the abundance of irrelevant information, the information-action ratio/signal to noise ratio is dramatically altered.
“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”
2. Impotence
The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. Before telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. However, this sense of potency was lost with telegraphy, precisely because the whole world became the context for news. Everything became everyone’s business. We were sent information which answered questions we didn’t ask and that did not allow the right of reply.
3. Incoherence
Telegraphy brought into being a world of broken time attention. Its main strength was the capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.
“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.”
The telegraph introduced the language of headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal. Its language was discontinuous: one message had no connection another, each “headline” stood alone as its own context. “Knowing” the facts took on a new meaning: intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
Telegraphic communication permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative.
Pseudo-context: a structure invented to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use. The use it provides is not action, or problem-solving, or change, only information with no genuine connection to our lives
The Peek-a-Boo World: all new media that entered the electronic conversation followed the lead of the telegraph and the photograph, amplifying their biases. It is a world without much coherence or sense but also endlessly entertaining. There is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.
“Television has achieved the status of “meta-medium”—an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well.”
We have so thoroughly accepted televisions’ definitions of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.
The Age of Show Business
The television is devoted entirely to supplying its audience with entertainment. The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds. The eye never rests and has always something new to see. It offers a variety of subjects that require minimal skills to understand and is aimed at emotional gratification. Even commercials are exquisitely crafted, always pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music.
“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.”
A news show is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis. Thinking does not play well on television, as there is not much to see in it. It’s not a performing art.
“The single most important fact about television is that people watch it, which is why it is called “television. ”And what they watch, and like to watch, are moving pictures—millions of them, of short duration and dynamic variety. It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business.”
People no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. We do not exchange ideas, we exchange images. We do not argue with propositions but with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.
“Now … This”
On television, nearly every half hour is a discrete event, separated in content, context, and emotional texture from what precedes and follows it. News are fragmented and without context, consequences, value, or seriousness; they are pure entertainment. The average length of any news story is forty-five seconds, which is not enough time to explore the whole depth of a story. And no matter how grave the news, it’s followed by a series of short commercials.
“Imagine what you would think of me, and this book, if I were to pause here, tell you that I will return to my discussion in a moment, and then proceed to write a few words in behalf of United Airlines or the Chase Manhattan Bank. You would rightly think that I had no respect for you and, certainly, no respect for the subject. And if I did this not once but several times in each chapter, you would think the whole enterprise unworthy of your attention. Why, then, do we not think a news show similarly unworthy?”
Television alters the meaning of “being informed” by creating misleading information: misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something. We lose the 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?
“Television has achieved the power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also defined how we shall respond to it. In presenting news to us packaged as vaudeville, television induces other media to do the same, so that the total information environment begins to mirror television.”
USA Today is modeled on the format of television. Television taught magazines that news is nothing but entertainment and the magazines taught television that nothing but entertainment is news. Even the language of radio newscasts has become increasingly decontextualized and discontinuous. We move into a “trivial pursuit” information environment: news are a source of amusement, not knowledge. Shuffle Off to Bethlehem On television, religion is presented as an entertainment.
“What makes these television preachers the enemy of religious experience is not so much their weaknesses but the weaknesses of the medium in which they work.”
Changing the form of expression also change its meaning, texture or value. Being present and talking to a friend who just lost a loved one has a different meaning than a condolence card. What is televised is transformed from what it was to something else, which may or may not preserve its former essence.
“There is no great religious leader—from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther—who offered people what they want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to offering people what they need. It is “user friendly.” It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery.”
Reach Out and Elect Someone
Show business main business is to please the crowd. With the switch to television, politics became show business. The idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty, but to appear as if you are. The television is the main vehicle to present political ideas, used in political campaigns and through commercials. Commercials are on average 15 seconds and use visual symbols that help us learn the lessons being taught. Being sold solutions is better than being confronted with questions about problems.
“The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.”
All great television commercials provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves. Politics followed the same lead:
“Like television commercials, image politics is a form of therapy, which is why so much of it is charm, good looks, celebrity and personal disclosure.”
A book is all history. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. Television is a speed-of-light medium that permits no access to the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening “now”. Its purpose is to move fragments of information, not to collect and organize them. Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them.
Teaching as an Amusing Activity
The new education is based on the speed-of-light electronic image, with new conceptions of knowledge and how it is acquired. There are three commandments that form the philosophy of the education which television offers:
- No prerequisites: every television program must be a complete package in itself with no previous knowledge required. It undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself
- No perplexity: perplexity means low ratings. There must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or endured. Any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the amusement – not the growth – of the learner is important
- No exposition: television-teaching always takes the form of story-telling, conducted through dynamic images and supported by music
“The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is entertainment. And when one considers that save for sleeping there is no activity that occupies more of an American youth’s time than television-viewing, we cannot avoid the conclusion that a massive reorientation toward learning is now taking place.”
Classrooms are now a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be vastly amusing activities.
The Huxleyan Warning
When people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch. The solution must be found in how we watch. No medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are
“[Aldous Huxley] believed that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
https://dansilvestre.com/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman/
