Amusing Ourselves to Death

The claim

Neil Postman was a professor of media ecology at New York University, a field he helped found, which studies how media shape human perception and culture. Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, opens with a comparison of two famous dystopias. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four imagined a society controlled by fear, censorship and the suppression of information. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagined a society controlled by pleasure, in which people come to love their own oppression and lose interest in truth. Postman’s claim is that Huxley, not Orwell, had better foreseen the America of the 1980s. The threat to public life was not that truth would be hidden but that it would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

The mechanism, he argues, is television. Not bad programmes, but the medium itself, which favours images over arguments, immediacy over continuity and entertainment over thought. As television became the main way Americans learned about the world, every kind of public discourse had to take the form of entertainment to be heard.

How the case is built

Postman’s first step is to argue that media are not neutral containers. Adapting Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase that the medium is the message, he proposes that the medium is the metaphor: each medium carries an implicit theory of what knowledge is and how it should be expressed. A culture dominated by speech values memory and proverb; a culture dominated by writing values exposition, logic and sustained argument; a culture dominated by television values what can be shown in moving images and absorbed in moments.

His second step is a portrait of what he calls typographic America. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he argues, American public life was shaped by print. Literacy was high, pamphlets and newspapers were everywhere, and audiences were used to following long arguments. His most vivid example is the debates of 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, in which audiences listened to speeches lasting hours, full of complex sentences and closely reasoned points. Such audiences, Postman argues, had minds formed by reading.

His third step traces the changes that undermined that culture. The telegraph, from the 1840s, made information from far away instantly available, and so turned news into a stream of disconnected facts with no bearing on the reader’s life. Photography added images without context. Television combined both and made them the centre of the culture.

His fourth step examines television’s effect on specific areas. News becomes a show, structured by the phrase “Now… this”, which signals that what came before has no connection to what comes next. Politics becomes a matter of image rather than argument. Religion on television becomes performance. Education, in programmes such as Sesame Street, teaches children that learning should be entertaining, which Postman argues teaches them to love television rather than school.

What it takes for granted

The argument assumes that the print culture of the nineteenth century was, overall, better for public reasoning than what replaced it. Postman makes the case directly, but it is a large claim, since that culture also excluded many people from public life, and literacy was unevenly shared.

It also assumes that the form of a medium matters more than its content. Postman does not say that all television is bad; he says that serious programmes on television still carry the medium’s bias toward entertainment. This is the heart of the argument and the part most open to debate, since it implies that improving content cannot solve the problem.

Since it was published

Postman died in 2003, before social media and smartphones. His argument has nonetheless been widely revived since, because the internet seems to many readers to have intensified the tendencies he described: shorter attention, endless streams of unconnected information, politics as performance. His son Andrew Postman wrote in 2017 that his father’s warnings about television applied with even more force to the platforms that followed. Writers on the attention economy, such as Nicholas Carr, Tim Wu and Johann Hari, have drawn on him. The site’s essays Everyone You Know, and Everyone You Don’t and What You Might Also Like follow some of the same questions into social media and recommendation feeds.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks what your medium does to your message. Every format, from slide decks to video calls to chat threads, favours some kinds of thought and discourages others. A team that discusses everything in short chat messages will think differently from one that writes long memos.

It asks whether the information you consume is connected to anything you can act on. Postman’s critique of the telegraph applies to dashboards and news feeds: information without context or consequence can crowd out understanding.

And for people who build media, it asks what the product’s form teaches its users to value. A product designed to entertain will shape what its users expect from every other part of life. The site’s idea page The Remedy That Is Also a Poison explores the double nature of such technologies.