Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman
In 1986 or so I went to a talk at MIT by Neil Postman, an American writer and educator. His topic was derived from his recently published book Amusing Ourselves to Death, a major critique of American society in which he argued that entertainment had replaced actual news, serious inquiry, or even thinking. I was so enthralled by his talk that I bought his book and read it in a single setting. Postman died in 2003, but he told us in 1985 exactly how it was going to be in 2024.
For Postman, it was not the Orwell in 1984 who best laid out a dystopian future, it was Huxley in Brave New World. Orwell feared book banning. Huxley feared no one would want to read a book. Postman articulates Huxley’s vision by enumerating the realities overtaking society in the mid-‘80s. Indeed, his concerns about television and show business replacing reading and thinking have been multiplied a hundred times over. A flash on our phones, and our immediate response, is our “soma.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Postman recently, how all he was worrying about 40 years ago has become our omnipresent reality; he was appalled back then that an actor (Reagan) could become president. Even as dire as politics had become by 1985, what has happened since pales in comparison. Trump, for instance, has used every negative trick cited in Postman’s book to put himself forward.
We didn’t listen to Postman then. We are probably not even capable of listening now to the way the social media society has overtaken our lives, our sense of order, our awareness of a world on fire. Indeed, rereading Postman was a revelation. A depressing revelation. He notes, for instance, that “television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”
He also pinpoints when news organizations largely ceased to question disinformation: “A New York Times article is headlined on February 15, 1983: ‘REAGAN MISSTATEMENTS GETTING LESS ATTENTION’. The article begins in the following way: ‘President Reagan’s aides used to become visibly alarmed at suggestions that he had given mangled and perhaps misleading accounts of his policies or of current events in general. That doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. Indeed, the President continues to make debatable assertions of fact but news accounts do not deal with them as extensively as they once did. In the view of White House officials, the declining news coverage mirrors a decline in interest by the general public.’”
He goes on to say, “This report is not so much a news story as a story about the news, and our recent history suggests that it is not about Ronald Reagan’s charm. It is about how news is defined….”
As we know from the constant lies passing for information in 2024, that there is ultimately little concern among many about rampant disinformation, or what “news” has become, particularly on social media or even Cable TV.
Postman seems to have incisively hit all the ominous, then rising trends, that would become our present: the rise of evangelicals, TV personalities as politicians, politicians as television personalities, appearance over substance, the 22-second attention span, the death of reading, the suppression of inquiry, censorship of books and ideas. But perhaps, worst of all, a nonchalance about what we have lost and are losing. Or as he frames it, in regard to Huxley: “He 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.”
— Review by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
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