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Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

It seems distant now, but once upon a time the Internet was going to save us from the menace of TV. Since the late fifties, TV has had a special role, both as the country’s dominant medium, in audience and influence, and as a bête noire for a certain strain of American intellectuals, who view it as the root of all evil. In “Amusing Ourselves to... See more

Chris Hayes • On the Internet, We’re Always Famous

Technopoly

Neil Postman • 1 highlight

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Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla

Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.

Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

To ask is to break the spell.

Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Neil Postman: “Am I Using This Technology? Or Is It Using Me?” (1995)

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Every new medium of communication changes communication, whether that’s painting or hieroglyphs or the alphabet or television. Each medium creates a new orientation for thought, expression, and sensibility.

Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

the point I am trying to make is that only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of information, through a demystification of media, is there any hope of our gaining some measure of control over television, or the computer, or any other medium.