Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

"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." -Neil PostmanAmusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In the Age of Showbusiness by Neil Postman is a book outside my usual reading patterns, but, I am glad to say I enjoyed this book, and can even call it an eye-opener, a paradigm shifter, and even among the most compelling arguments I've ever read to think carefully and cautiously about the direction our culture is headed. If you are a Cinema Media Arts major, a Business Marketing major, a Theater Arts major, a History major, or just a person that wants to think about how media affects us, this book is a mandatory read.Neil Postman argues that the things we love: technology, television, radio, computers, and the internet, all things we are entertained by, have and will turn our society into a vacuum of "absurdity" and "irrelevance" if they go unchecked."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."If you don't agree, consider these basic questions: When was the last time you had a "deep" conversation? How often do you discuss "ideas" as opposed to "trivialities" with your friends? Does "public discourse" (conversations) seem more emotion-based or logic-based? Why in the world is this happening, because, historically speaking, this is not normal."The Medium Is The Message"If you've ever listened to Pink Floyd's Amused To Death, or better yet, Switchfoot's Selling The News, both of those songs are based off of this book, showing the importance of this book, at least to modern alternative and rock music bands. Both these songs mention the phrase: "The medium is the message".In other words, the medium (tool) that our culture uses to communicate (Newspapers or TV) with ourselves and with each other will determine the content and quality of the message (of what is being communicated). In short, the form of communication determines the content and quality of what is being communicated. There are largely three cultural mediums that cultures have used to communicate, 1.) speech-centered (think B.C. when the printing press wasn't around and all people could do was tell stories and communicate by word of mouth), 2.) print-centered (think books, print newspapers, pamphlets, etc.), and 3.) image-centered (think televisions, the internet, and magazines...)A Monumental ShiftIn our age, we are experiencing a monumental shift in "mediums" of communication, and as the phrase goes, the "message" is being changed as well. The "Age of Exposition" as Postman calls it, which was America from it's conception to the 1960′s, was marked by a national fervor to read books. The "Age of Show-business" as Postman calls it, is marked by a national fervor to watch images on a screen.Consider the act of reading, how it encourages "rationality" and how confronting a page of symbols requires a person to "understand". It demands solemn response rather than impulsive reaction. This is so, mainly because,"to engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and over-generalizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another..."Reading forms your mind like a potter forms clay, into a logical, reasoning, discerning, deducing, powerful machine.In the America of the 1800′s people would listen to political speeches, such as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates which lasted for seven hours at time, just for fun, and it wasn't uncommon to find a crowd of people surrounding a person giving an intellectual oration on a dead tree stump. Lecture halls spanned the 50 states where throngs of people would line up and pay money, sometimes upwards of $200 to hear public intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, for hours, and they did that just like we watch movies at a theater today. Clearly our intention-span has diminished a great deal, and our focus has turned from intellectuality to entertainment, almost 180 degrees.The TVThe introduction of the TV has affected the minds and hearts of our culture greatly. Consider the difference between watching TV and reading a book, how watching short snippets of presentations, where the hook comes around and around to entice our emotions, while reading demands sitting for long periods of time, where the author means everything he says and is appealing to our logic and reason. TV pulls us from the past to a perpetual present where it sells you each second you're watching by "appealing to your passions", reading pulls us from the present to the wide scope of history, past, present, and future and sells us not with passions but with sound arguments and logical appeals. The abdication of the second means a culture largely driven by emotions, passions, and enticing images rather than sound arguments, logic, and careful reasoning."With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present."ChristianityWhat really caught my interest was Postman's analysis of the affect of Television on religion, particularly Christianity. The Christian Revivals of the early days of America were headed by religious intellectual giants like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, but the religious Revivals of today are led by religious show entertainers with shallow doctrines and emotional appeals."It would be a serious mistake to think of Billy Graham or any other television revivalist as a latter-day Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney. Edwards was one of the most brilliant and creative minds ever produced by America. His contribution to aesthetic theory was almost as important as his contribution to theology. His interests were mostly academic; he spent long hours each day in his study. He did not speak to his audiences extemporaneously. He read his sermons, which were tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions of theological doctrine...religious thought and institutions in America were dominated by an austere, learned, and intellectual form of discourse that is largely absent from religious life today.""I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether."Too Much NewsAre you tired of reading the news? I am, and I believe Postman is absolutely correct in his analysis that the advent of the telegraph made everything relevant or irrelevant into "news", whether it be Snoop Dog changing his name to Snoop Lion, the reoccurring event that some new celebrity insanity has shaved her head, or the ridiculous name of the baby of some movie actress marriage that only lasts for a year. All news is news whether it is irrelevant to us or not."...most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action."What Can We Do?The inevitable question is: What can we do to put a stop to this degeneration of culture?The answer is simple: Think!This involves actually reading books, and teaching yourself to analyze rather than just accepting TV. You cannot get by today without reading good books. Reading is the process and practice of ordering, analyzing, discerning, categorizing, and reasoning and you cannot be an intelligent person if you do not have a healthy intake of good challenging books."But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple."Is This Just Culture Whining?One possible objection to reading this book is: isn't this just another person whining about the ills of society and banging their cup against the ground in objection? Fair enough, I asked the same question when reading this book, several times.Consider how we are adamantly opposed to external slavery as a nation. We broke away from tyranny from the start and we have been a nation of "freedom" and "liberty" ever since. It is not culture whining to decry an externally caused force of tyranny. This is the same tyrrany all the same, it is just disguised as an internal form of slavery, where our desires control us, and our own passions turn our culture into slaves of our own trivialities."Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?"

In January of 1776, Thomas Paine published a book called Common Sense: The Origin and Design of Government. It sold 100,000 copies in the first two months. Today, a book would have to sell 11,000,000 copies to match the proportion of the population that Paine’s book reached. Common Sense went on to print somewhere between 300,000-400,000 copies, equivalent to somewhere between 33,000,000-44,000,000 people today. As Postman notes in Amusing Ourselves to Death, the “only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Superbowl.”In the mid 1800s, Abraham Lincoln and one of his political adversaries (Stephen A. Douglas) used to have public debates that lasted hours. Each participant would get a minimum of an hour of speaking time before the other rose for a rebuttal, and debates could often last upwards of 4 hours. What is even more remarkable is that the audience of regular common people was rapt with attention for the entire affair. Today, politicians are given 1 minute to give an opinion on a major issue and their opponent is expected to keep their rebuttal to 30 seconds.So, there is a definitive difference in the mainstream intelligence of people from our past in comparison to people today. How did this come to be? Postman posits that it is due to the rise of television as our main source of information gathering. In the 17th and 18th centuries ideas were shared via writing (and if you go back father, to the days of humanity before writing and reading were wide-spread, when ideas were only shared orally, the scholars and politicians of the day were those select men with a knack for oratorical skills.) Postman notes how the first fifteen presidents of the United States most likely wouldn’t have been recognized by their citizens on the street, yet those same citizens could have identified them by their latest speech or piece of distributed writing. Today, things are quite different. Postman wrote this book in the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan was president—a man who was previously a big time Hollywood actor in the 1960s and built a national reputation as someone on the silver screen. Even more recently we endured the presidency of Donald Trump, the former host of a reality television series. Was Donald Trump a good politician? The debate is still out. Is he entertaining? Absolutely—he is the most entertaining politician we have ever had in the age of television and I personally am not surprised at all that he is the most popular politician in the United States right now.The core argument of Postman’s book is not only that television changed how we receive information, but it changed our entire relationship to information on an epistemological level. Whereas writing is geared towards conceptual thinking, sequential order, careful reasoning, objectivity, and a delayed response, television is meant for entertainment. Television, with its constantly moving pictures and engaging sound effects, is meant to be amusing. When we indulge in TV for entertainment’s sake, sinking into the couch after a hard day’s work to watch our favorite half hour comedy, that is not the TV that Postman is talking about. The TV that has decimated attention spans and amused us to a breaking point is the TV that has infiltrated our religions, our politics, and our education systems. “As a television show, and a good one,” Postman writes, “Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.”With television’s incorporation of the news cycle, our ways of learning about the world are also stunted. We get a story about the Middle East, and then a minute later we’re hearing about gridlock in the Senate, quickly followed by a story about a dog riding a crocodile in Florida. These are all entertaining stories to be sure, but what do they all have in common? For 99% of us, they have no impact on our daily lives. Do I wish there was less violence in the Middle East? Of course. What can I actually do about it? Essentially nothing. With all the graphic images and sounds coming out of the television screen, however, it is incredibly engaging and I can’t look away!Television is designed to make everything it touches entertaining, and it has infiltrated our culture so much so that with the advancement of the internet and social media, the trends in this book have only exacerbated. “The form in which ideas are expressed affects what those idea will be,” Postman writes, and I couldn’t agree more. We the people now expect everything in life, whether it be news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion, etc., to entertain us. If it doesn’t, we don’t want it. Personally, I believe that our culture would benefit tremendously from a return to typography—a large part of the reason why I started reading and writing book reviews in the first place. Books are where real education lies, and in my opinion a better education is the way towards a better future. The internet has recently made huge swaths of information readily available (thanks Wikipedia!) so we now must take focus from what we are learning and return focus to how we go about learning it.

“What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells 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.”