Aug

10

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Filed Under Media, Reading Room 

Amusing Ourselves“In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.” —Neil Postman

I can’t believe it took me this long to finally read the late Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Published in 1984, unfortunately, it is still just as relevant today as it was then.

Although loaded with quotes and quips by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, Postman takes things a step further and argues why television is killing us. “The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health. 60 Minutes, Eye-Witness News and Sesame Street are.”

With an initial nod to Orwell’s 1949 classic Nineteen Eighty-Four and to Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World, Postman believes Huxley got it right when he said that what we love will be our ruin.

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. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

What follows is my feeble attempt to string together personal highlights after immersing myself over several days in this thoughtful book.

It began with the clock…
“And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser.”

“And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.”

…and public discourse went from oral to print…
“The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.”

“Methodist camp meetings combined picnics with opportunities to listen to oratory.”

“What kind of audience was this [who listened to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates]? Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate themselves to seven hours of oratory? These were people who regarded such events as essential to their political education.”

“This language is pure print. That the occasion required it to be spoken aloud cannot obscure that fact. And that the audience was able to process it through the ear is remarkable only to people whose culture no longer resonates powerfully with the printed word.”

“Even the sounds of sentences of spoken words are rarely engaging except when composed by those with extraordinary poetic gifts. If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell.”

…slowly moving from reason and logic to an appeal to our passions…
“In 1786, Benjamin Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books.”

“Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, ‘the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; …print made a greater impression than actual events…. To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-leaming.’”

“Unlike the principal figures in today’s ‘great awakening’—Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, et al.—yesterday’s leaders of revivalist movements in America were men of learning, faith in reason, and generous expository gifts. Their disputes with the religious establishments were as much about theology and the nature of consciousness as they were about religious inspiration.”

“The differences between the character of discourse in a print-based culture and the character of discourse in a television-based culture are also evident if one looks at the legal system.”

“Indeed, the history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered, all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment.”

“Advertising was, as Stephen Douglas said in another context, intended to appeal to understanding, not to passions.”

“The printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect, there being no other means, besides the oral tradition, to have access to public knowledge.”

“This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.”

“The name I give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition.”

…because the more we ‘know’, the greater our inaction becomes…
“[With the telegraph], transportation and communication could be disengaged from each other, that space was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information.”

“For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make ‘one neighborhood of the whole country.’”

“The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence.”

“The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”

“Prior to the age of 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.”

“To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”

…and television is the king of entertaining inaction…
“If television is a continuation of anything, it is of a tradition begun by the telegraph and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not by the printing press in the fifteenth.”

“The assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle.”

“For these reasons and more television will not have the same meaning or power as it does in America.”

“But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.”

“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.”

“Thinking does not play well on television.”

“The single most important fact about television is that people watch it, which is why it is called television.”

“Therefore—and this is the critical point—how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.”

…meanwhile religion is further marginalized…
“[One example is that] on television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”

“Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”

“The danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows but that television shows may become the content of religion.”

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

…and education is being re-defined…
“Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch.”

“John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning.”

“The greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes … may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history…. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”

“We learn what we do.”

“America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education.”

“I mean only to say that, like the alphabet or the printing press, television has by its power to control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”

“But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment.”

“Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.”

“There must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount.”

“The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is entertainment.”

“The consequences of this reorientation are to be observed not only in the decline of the potency of the classroom but, paradoxically, in the refashioning of the classroom into a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be vastly amusing activities.”

“The content of the school curriculum is being determined by the character of television, and even worse, that character is apparently not included as part of what is studied.”

…in the end, the joke is on us.
“For America is engaged in the world’s most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug.”

“For in the end, [Huxley] 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.”

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