Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Communication 317m - #1398
Dr. G. E. Forsberg
Lesson Two
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death chronicles the rise of television culture in America, from colonial times to the modern day; though of course, there were no televisions around in colonial America. This is precisely Postman's focus--the way that America was as a culture first in the age where print media reigned supreme, and how the advent of faster information technologies like television, radio, and even morse code have affected us each in turn. His overall take on the way our society has developed as a result of these technologies (primarily the television) is unapologetically negative, and he strongly correlates the rise of television culture with the decline of the value of our public discourse, and I think it fair to generally paraphrase his argument as 'television is dumbing us down.' Postman does not entirely discount that television can have value, mentioning the comfort it brings to the elderly and the sick and the power it has to stir our passions in the name of good causes, yet firmly he contends that television pollutes public discourse—specifically addressing our political, religious, informational and commercial conversations. To let the man speak for himself, in his own words Postman's main assertion is that as the age of typography fades away to be replaced by television, “the seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines” (29). From America's beginning to well into the nineteenth century, America was as wholly a nation centered on the printed word and an oratorical style founded thereupon as any other in history. “The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of it's monopoly” (Postman, 41). Our founding fathers were renaissance
Dr. G. E. Forsberg
Lesson Two
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death chronicles the rise of television culture in America, from colonial times to the modern day; though of course, there were no televisions around in colonial America. This is precisely Postman's focus--the way that America was as a culture first in the age where print media reigned supreme, and how the advent of faster information technologies like television, radio, and even morse code have affected us each in turn. His overall take on the way our society has developed as a result of these technologies (primarily the television) is unapologetically negative, and he strongly correlates the rise of television culture with the decline of the value of our public discourse, and I think it fair to generally paraphrase his argument as 'television is dumbing us down.' Postman does not entirely discount that television can have value, mentioning the comfort it brings to the elderly and the sick and the power it has to stir our passions in the name of good causes, yet firmly he contends that television pollutes public discourse—specifically addressing our political, religious, informational and commercial conversations. To let the man speak for himself, in his own words Postman's main assertion is that as the age of typography fades away to be replaced by television, “the seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines” (29). From America's beginning to well into the nineteenth century, America was as wholly a nation centered on the printed word and an oratorical style founded thereupon as any other in history. “The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of it's monopoly” (Postman, 41). Our founding fathers were renaissance