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This is a wonderful book that belongs on your shelf. But something is amiss in our society, and this book at least helps highlight the problems in a thought provoking and yes. even a beautiful danse macabre way. Applying Huxley's horrible Brave New World to our world is both obvious and enlightening. It is not the end of the discussion, but it's part of it.Oh, and read Huxley if you haven't yet. Are we a society of vapid materialism because of TV's vapid materialism, or it is the other way around, and our TV is a reflection of what's wrong with us. It's a project that deserves attention and this is an example of such a project that was done quite well.It's certainly easy to let this devolve into a 'chicken or egg' argument. Is it some kind of problem in education or in mankind or America.
I think that Postman greatly overstates the case when he discusses how much more literate the U.S. (This is the so-called "Flynn Effect"). Another aspect that I enjoyed (as a college professor) was Postman's discussion of how educators increasingly face pressure to entertain in the classroom; I think that any teacher can relate to this material.Postman has a great, involved discussion on the nature of television that will make readers think; TV is ".a way of understanding the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of, that seems, in a word, natural. a way of thinking that is so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible. How did this happen if our minds were rotting under TV's influence.In the end, Postman's greatest accomplishment is to write about the "big" issues facing our world; I suspect that relatively few readers will find themselves unmoved by AOTD. The book is ambitious, in that its 163 pages contain both a media history of the U.S. The writing is a mixed bag. As Postman sees it, it is TV (and the useless ocean of trivia that TV broadcasts) that has created a passive, uninformed American populace.There are many things to like about AOTD.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, social critic Neil Postman takes aim at the role that TV plays in degrading the quality of public discourse in the United States. 36). At times, Postman shows a wonderful, dry wit. culture. Twenty years ago, the question, Does television shape culture or merely reflect it. Held considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. Postman's central argument in AOTD is that US citizens are allowing the government to take away their rights because the citizens are not sufficiently well informed to oppose the government. Postman maintains, therefore, that it is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that represents the nightmare in which we live; Postman says that, in Huxley's world, ".there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one" (p.
citizens. There are several witty jabs in the book that often take the reader by surprise. For instance, he discusses a publisher who maintained that ".a newspaper in Boston was necessary to combat the spirit of lying which then prevailed in Boston and, I am told, still does" (p. A general criticism of AOTD would be that Postman does not do enough to acknowledge information that runs counter to his thesis that TV destroys U.S. 79).
After all, in the 1900s there were dramatic increases in IQ scores among U.S. As to whether Postman is correct or not, each reader will have to decide for him- or herself. public was in the 1700s and 1800s. vii). Unfortunately, Postman can also lapse into academic "gobbledygook" that can be very tiresome.
Other aspects of AOTD are not as positive. and a discussion of the media's effect on the United States' intellectual climate. The question has largely disappeared as television has become our culture" (p.
It alone would have done more for advancing the debate over the deterioration of public discourse in this country than the sum of Postman's largely sophistic postulates and it alone is worthy of the two-star rating]. Many of Postman's premises underpinning his theses seem to be ill-formed or just plain illogical. As he saw it, people will come to. While the prevention of the Orwellian nightmare occupied the generation preceding--and to only a slightly lesser extent since--the year 1984, it was Huxley's future, Postman argues, that we should have been--and still should be and forever remain--on guard against. 46) is patently absurd. To counter Postman directly, the shape of a man's body may, in fact, be quite relevant to the shape of his ideas.
Take for example his surprising suggestion that "half the principles of capitalism. As Aristophanes famously said, "Youth ages. For example, he opines that a fat man could not run for President of these United States today because the "grossness of a three-hundred-pound image (on TV) . would easily overwhelm any logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech." (p. Additionally, in a world of nuclear proliferation and persistent and consistent armed conflict, it can be argued that an unhealthy President poses a national security threat. On the one hand, Postman rails against television for dumbing down our public discourse, then on the other, suggests dumbed down discourse is all a television culture can handle. Perhaps Postman's own public discourse should be elevated.Similarly, his contradictory suggestion that "people of a television culture need `plain language' both aurally and visually" (p. Ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever." Stupidity is as old as the human race and as long as stupid people exist, there will be stupid shows to watch on television.
we no longer communicate through symbols carved on cave walls and I dare say we are no worse for having lost that mode of communication and arguably better). are irrelevant" and "that economics is less a science than a performing art." (p. But the same can be said of his thesis as a whole. [NOTE: For all my criticism of this book, it is worth noting that Postman's history of the written word in America (Chapter 3: Typographic America) is fascinating.
Neil Postman's 1984 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is an engaging, if not depressing treatise on why Aldous Huxley's dark vision of humanity's future as thoughtless, mind-numbed entertainment-gluts in his 1932 novel, A Brave New World (Huxley reassesses the future world he envisioned in 1958 with the essay A Brave New World Revisited) was more accurate than George Orwell's vision of an oppressive, book-banning, power-hungry authority asserting vast control over the masses as outlined in Orwell's equally dystopic 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The contribution of television to historic, citizen-based changes such as the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam and Iraq wars and the protests those wars spawned, the environmental movement, and even the end of the Cold War deserve discussion in any examination of media and politics, yet is completely absent in this brief volume. It would be erroneous to assign sole responsibility for any of these social events to a single dominant form of media, but Postman seems to do just that with regard to our modern ills, of which there are not only plenty, but plenty of causes. While the argument is worth making and the debate worth having, his philosophical waxing leaves me wanting to say the least. Perhaps a wiser argument could be made favoring elevated discourse in our television programming rather than presuming those that watch television are too stupid to understand it.I have cited but a handful of examples in Postman's book of how his thesis is weakened by seemingly plausible but ultimately misleading arguments.
He offers only the uncredited observation that "American businessmen discovered. "[I]n Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. Immaturity is outgrown. 4) While peripherally true, this has little bearing on the relevance of capitalism or the rigors of economic study. Postman provides little evidence that television has damaged America's body politic or retarded the growth of our intellectual discourse, public or otherwise. Public discourse in this country was not weakened by the advent of the television; it was weakened by the advent of weak public discourse. Postman's dissertation about how the pre-television age empowered our citizens fails to acknowledge any of America's infamous atrocities (slavery, Native American genocide, etc). Does anyone really believe public discourse in this country can be elevated by simply getting rid of the television.
5 and 6), and he puts the blame squarely on television. The economics of capitalism are far too regarded to simply be carelessly sacrificed on his rhetorical altar without considerably more evidence than Postman provides. In largely ignoring the relationship between media and the social events of the day that also define "the television culture," Postman's arguments for media influence seem both irrelevant and naïve.Television is a reflection of society and none of society's ills can be cured by simply breaking the mirror. adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." (Foreword, vii)Postman's book is a cause-and-effect cultural polemic, warning us that public discourse is dissolving into "the arts of show business" and "vast triviality" (p. Television is not the cause of weaker public discourse, it is the result of it, notwithstanding Postman's unpersuasive intimation (chapter 2) of a media-induced epistemological shift (e.g. that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of their display." (p. 7) There is no acknowledgment from Postman that obesity is a serious health concern and in an era in which those health concerns were and are well known, it is not unreasonable to infer than an obese person lacks personal self-discipline and will power, two characteristics reasonably desirable in the leader of the free world. 5) Economics at its core is the study of how societies allocate their limited resources, and to reduce this to a performing art, even hyperbolically, undermines the argument being made.
He surprised me with his theory that contrary to what most people - including me - assume, it's not the junk tv that poses the threat, but the so-called 'serious', pseudo-intellectual stuff that is really just junk dressed up as something meaningful, and that that is more harmful than junk that doesn't pretend to be what it isn't. He particularly laments the fall of the written word, and those of us who love to read and appreciate the importance of it probably concur. It was a powerful argument and although I'm not sure I agree with it 100%, the point was well-taken. Great treatise on the idea that television turns all of life into entertainment and undermines other forms of communication. That serious issues like politics, religion, education and news are nothing more than brief sound bytes, fed to us in tiny but dramatic spoonfuls before turning tail and going on to something else, and that this disconnected, fragmented barrage degrades its significance and desensitizes us over time.
Sound thoughts on why true political discourse is dead, and how that media induced condition is likely to affect our lives.
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