Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman: Culture Dominated by Television

It does not often occur to people that the root of many of society’s problems today is the medium through which these problems are presented and discussed. Yet when looking at the way people obtained their information prior to this century and how the issues of the day were discussed, the stark contrast between then and now becomes so clear that it’s a wonder that we barely notice what’s been happening. The crisis is the gradual dumbing-down of our discourse since the dawn of the information age, and the treatment of the serious issues of our time as nothing more than fodder for entertainment. Television is the biggest culprit, and those of us who grew up on television have been damaged in ways that are now so universally common that they go unnoticed. Neil Postman’ s examination of this problem in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a dire warning of the consequences of living in a culture dominated by television, and while over 20 years have passed since this book was written, the introduction of the internet has made this work even more relevant today than it was then.

Postman’s central claim has to do with a comparison between two very different imagined Utopian societies in literature from the earlier half of the century. The first is Orwell’s dark authoritarian society from 1984, while the other is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which people are not oppressed by external forces but have simply allowed themselves to be brainwashed into believing themselves to be happy. Postman’s central assertion is that Orwell got it wrong while Huxley got it right. We have not become slaves to higher authority, but we have allowed our society to deteriorate into a spiritually and intellectually dead environment.

The proposition that constitutes the foundation of Postman’s claim is that the media we use determines the form of our discourse. We may be discussing the same issue today that we were in 1808, but we will be