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Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
Reviewed by Sandra Alexander
7 November 2004

Neil Postman analyzes how television has dumbed us down. Generation X, the product of the “television nanny,” has difficulty focusing. They are often unable to employ the higher level reasoning skills which take concentration and other characteristics.

Postman continues: “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, 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.” (Foreword, vii,viii)

Marshall McLuhan once stated that “the media is the message.” Mr. Postman agrees with McLuhan’s hypothesis, but carries it one step further. “A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.” (p. 10) “Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.” (p. 15)

Postman next attempts to show “that a great media-metaphor shift (from typography to television) has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.” The form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be.” (p. 31) The form also is relevant to its truth. “The written word endures, the spoken word disappears; and that is why writing is closer to the truth than speaking.” (p. 21)

Postman refers to the period of time during which the American mind was “submitted to the sovereignty of the printing press” as the Age of Exposition. He defines exposition as “a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. Toward the end of the nineteenth century … the Age of Exposition began to pass, and the early signs of its replacement could be discerned. Its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business.” (p. 63)

Postman talks about the telegraph as the device which first created the possibility of “a unified American discourse….but at a considerable cost.” (p. 65) Henry David Thoreau remarked in Walden that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…” (p. 65) “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. Coleridge’s famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into “one neighborhood,” but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.” (p. 67) “For the first time, we were sent information (at a very rapid rate) which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply……or lead to any meaningful action or reflection or analysis” . (p. 69,68) Welcome to the world of “fragments and discontinuities.” (p. 70)

In his chapter“the Peek-a-Boo World,” Postman discusses the world of “mechanically reproduced imagery that spread unchecked throughout American culture in the mid-nineteenth century – photographs, prints, posters, drawings, advertisement. The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language, but bid to replace it as our dominant means for construing, understanding, and testing reality.” (p. 74) The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a veritable onslaught of “electronic techniques, introducing a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.

And then came television, which “gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection…..and it brought them into the home.” (p. 78)
Scholars and social critics used to ask the question, “Does television shape culture or merely reflect it?” (p. 79) This question has largely disappeared as television “has gradually become our culture…..We have adjusted to what may have at one time been termed “bizarre”, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed.” (p. 79-80)

Postman dedicates the rest of his book to showing that “television’s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing; that television’s conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase ‘serious television’ is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice-the voice of entertainment. He attempts to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.” (p. 80)

Perhaps the above is what television’s inventor, P.T. Farnsworth also feared. His son, Kent, quotes him: “There’s nothing on it worthwhile, and we’re not going to watch it in this household, and I don’t want it in your intellectual diet.” Kent further comments, “I suppose you could say that he felt he had created a kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives.” Neil Postman adds, “Farnsworth was not only the inventor of TV but also one of its earliest and most perceptive critics.” Marshall McLuhan’s comment on technology in general may also be applicable: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and therefore our tools shape us.”

Television has truly become both the media and the metaphor of American culture. In a 2002 article Joel Stein writes that “the average American leads the world in TV viewing, clocking 4 hours a day.” Feminist C. Paglia admits to a desire to have televisions all over her home. At the same time, in an interview with Postman she observes that Generation X, the product of the “television nanny,” have difficulty focusing. They are often unable to employ the higher level reasoning skills which take concentration and other characteristics (as defined by Postman above) .

As many researchers are discovering, television viewing (and the addictive video games such as “Everquest” which now occupy much of our culture’s spare moments) not only use limited brain function, but actually might be the cause of dangerous impairment. Every parent knows that their television-viewing child will balk at settling down to do the painful, lonely work of slogging through one of the “classics” for a book report. However, take the television away from many of these children for a period of time and many of them will discover the wonderful world of books that television had robbed them of.

One addendum: Postman’s book was written before the internet information explosion happened. This amazing new way of obtaining information and doing research, coupled with the advent of web sites and blogs, has attracted a whole cross section of Americans. These engaged internet users are now watching less television and getting much of their news and information from, yes, the printed word. I wonder how Postman would analyze this new cultural phenomenon. If the media truly is both the message and the metaphor, it seems that it’s an area worth exploring.

About Neil Postman: He was a “critic, writer, educator, and communications theorist. He has been chairman of the Department of Communication Arts at New York University and founder of its program in Media Ecology.

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