Amusing Ourselves To Death, by Neil Postman

I have an immense amount of books I want my kids to read over the next ten plus years of their

education in our house. But I have a very short list of especially important books that I have reserved for them to read just before they step into adulthood. They’re books that contain counter-cultural but fundamental ideas about language, the economy, culture and identity. I just put this book on that list.

And what is this paragon of books about? It’s about television in the eighties.

But Postman’s analysis of what television did to America in the eighties reverberates loudly into today. By explaining how television has changed our culture, he prophetically says things about the internet, about the smart phone age, about burgeoning AI use, that are vital for every modern American to hear.

Television is a medium that changes the message. All mediums change their message to some point.  For example, if you are going to grasp complex concepts and respond in a reasoned, intelligent way, the written word is unparalleled. You can build layers of reasoning, use precise words, reference other studies and other writings, make use of rigorous academic fail safes to give confidence in the truths postulated. For centuries, our country was incredibly literate and our education system was based around the written word.

Then entered the television. There is no context in television, no building on an argument. We are assailed by disparate messages. A news segment about some horror of war is immediately followed by a celebrity doing something silly for a personal health product ad. Postman calls it: “Now….this.”

Postman actually has no problem with pure entertainment in television. The problem is when we try to engage in serious, rational activity through television. Television follows three unspoken “commandments” of programming. “Thou shalt have no prerequisites,” “thou shalt induce no perplexity” and “thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt.” We convince ourselves that we are engaging in religious services, world news, and education through our screens but these three prerequisites destroy any chance of that happening on a serious, engaged level. Without context, without cohesive thought, without even the opportunity to dwell in perplexity as we mull over new ideas, we are simply gathering disconnected facts and imagining ourselves to be bettered by it. The true focus is on image and emotion.

Postman acknowledges that a Luddite response of simply getting rid of your television is not practical for an entire nation. The only real hope is simply becoming aware of what television does to our thinking. On the whole the greatest weakness of the book is its ending. He reveals a massive problem and his only solution is to be aware that it’s happening. While there is something to be said for being aware of how the medium affects the message, I personally would draw out a few more practical suggestions.

They’re really simple things. Here they are: invest in the community of people around you. Go to church. Get to know your neighbors. Have kids—and be willing to sacrifice a few personal goals in order to raise them in a loving, secure home. If the internet and its precursor, television, strip your world of context and splinter your arguments into sound bites, focus on what will truly counteract that: relationships with the people in your context. Sure, be on the internet (read my blog!) but prioritize face to face relationships.

A few more mild critiques—Postman does come across as a bit of a curmudgeon and he’s a little extreme. It’s not the end of the world to be educated by something entertaining. I watched Sesame Street and Reading Rainbow and Magic School Bus, and I also got a very good book-based education. But he’s right often enough that I can forgive him his grumpy excesses.

 He also says television isn’t good for religion because it encourages you to think about spiritual things in a non-spiritual place, like gasp your kitchen—I think that’s a misunderstanding of Christian theology, but it’s a pretty common misunderstanding for Christians, too, and he’s not a Christian, and it’s not the focus of the book, so, whatever…

He is both hilariously dismissive of computers and chillingly perspicacious. He says that our excitement over the computer is based on the idea that problems are caused by a lack of data, and if we just had easier, faster access to data, we would fix so many problems. But, he says, as computer use continues, it “will be noticed that the massive collection and speed of light retrieval of data have been of great value to large scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”  

He wrote that in 1985. And as resident of the Internet Age, I can verify that the computer has indeed created at least as many problems as it has solved. If we were harmed by the juxtaposition of an evening news report and a McDonalds ad, how much worse is the endless scroll of contextless info on a social media sight? Instead of two subjects in two minutes I can do a single swipe down my Facebook newsfeed and be exposed to MAGA rants, cute cat videos, calls to exterminate Israel, a reel about how to fix running form, a quote from Spurgeon, an impassioned plea to care about abandoned pet rabbits, a video of some celebrity dancing—and I can keep going for hours.

No wonder our young girls are killing themselves in despair. We are people meant for story, for context, for community, but we are abandoning those things for the cotton-candy of mindless entertainment and image, packaged so that we think we are becoming global-minded, well-informed citizens as we rot out our brains. Postman provides an increasingly necessary call to resist this decay.