[.ca] Amusing Ourselves To Death (ISBN 0140094385)

The Epistemology of Media:
(...) I think author Neil Postman has a lot of valuable things to say and reflect on. Several years ago I read his book Technopoly, which, along with several other books and articles I read at the time, led me to present a session at the 2001 TCEA convention entitled, "Remember the Luddites: Asking Critical Questions about Educational Technology." Technopoly was published in 1993, but now I have gone back to Postman's 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death. It seems a bit dated, with the advent of the Internet and all the changes which have come as a result, but I found the book to be none-the-less quite relevant and worthwhile. His overall theme of how our society (esp in the US) is tending to become more and more focused on entertainment via multimedia has many implications not only in an educational arena, but also for everyday life-- in the way we set our priorities, and in the final analysis-- the ways we choose (hopefully intentionally) to spend our limited heartbeats. Those small choices day to day add up to have a considerably dramatic cumulative effect. And his point is well taken about our typical, cultural LACK of intentionality when it comes to our consumption of multimedia content-- esp. television programming. In the May 2004 edition of Wired magazine, an article entitled "Watch This Way" documents a conversation between various moguls and pundits of our ever-growing entertainment industry. I found Yair Landau of Sony Picture's comment that "There are three basic human entertainment experiences that go back to the cave: storytelling, game-playing, and music" to be compelling. Author William Gibson added to this list of basic entertainment experiences "being part of the tribe." I have been giving a fair amount of thought lately to the value and opportunities posed by digital storytelling authoring tools in the early 21st Century. Most of my thinking along these lines is very optimistic and energetic, but it is good to temper this enthusiasm with some sober analysis like Postman's. I wouldn't call this blog entry a book-review per se-- I more think of it as a few reflections about some key points Postman makes in the book that I would like to remember and others may find worthwhile as well. As Landau pointed out, the desire to seek entertainment through storytelling and music is most likely universal. These are drives which transcend time and space. I am reminded of the futurists in the early part of the twentieth century (I think) who predicted that technology would lead to vast amounts of leisure time for people: with washing machines, dishwashers, and speedy cooking devices, people would have loads of free time to pursue other activities which were unthinkable in earlier times. I have laughed at that seemingly ridiculous prediction in the past, because today in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we seem to generally be harried, stressed, busy people who do not have enough time in the day for all the activities and demands which fill our schedules and minds. Yet despite all this busyness, we are clearly still finding large amounts of time to spend watching TV and entertaining ourselves in other ways. According to the Wired article previously cited, more and more Americans are watching LESS television today, but spending more time playing electronic games and surfing the Internet. That was not a trendline predicted by Postman in 1984. But we shouldn't be too hard on him for that oversight, Bill Gates apparently didn't see the Internet coming either. Despite this fact, Postman's analysis about our apparent intrinsic drive to seek entertainment via multimedia is still a cogent thesis for 21st century netizens.

Turn Off Your Television and Think For Yourself:
Most educated members of society have long recognized the danger of television. The cover of this book is a powerful image to illustrate the problem. Neil Postman takes a disturbing look at the social effects of television in "Amusing Ourselves to Death". While I may not agree with all of Postman's arguments, the book is able to make a strong statement about the dangers of television. My biggest objection to the book is the way Postman chooses to introduce his agrument against the televised media. He uses the novels "1984" and "Brave New World" as a backdrop for the his explanation of how American society become so listless and lethargic. A major rule I learned in undergraduate English was that you can not use fiction to support an argument. The idea in itself is absurd. It would be like using an episode of Star Trek to rationalize what kind of car you should buy. Once I got past this imperfection in the book, I found the author's statement to be reasonably solid. The basic idea discussed in this book is that when people learned by listening to teachers who accumulated knowledge, people were better learners. This is because the learner had to assimilate the knowledge into their brain and could ask questions to help the learning process. The written word and later the typed word made the learner think as he/she read. This learned a high level brain function. Nevertheless, people were learning. Television is a low level brain activity, which means people are less likely to learn as they watch. Television is often the most significant teacher a child has since the mid 20th century. Yet television's goal is not to educate but to entertain. Even educational programs like "Sesame Street" are flashy and structured like a series of comercials. It is no surprise that children are not learning in school when teachers can never be as flashy as television. Postman looks at education, televangelism, and the news media in the book. He demonstrates how televised media has degraded each of these facets of American life. His attention to the lack of real learning from the news is particularly disturbing. The only time I can think of when news was not flashy and meant to be entertaining was on September 11, 2001. This should make the reader seriously question the news programs he/she watches. While Postman lacks a real solution to the problem, I feel this is excusable when we consider television's stranglehold on society. The only way around the problem is to be educated to know how to watch television. This is a disturbingly good read. It will be particularly appreciated by the minority who never or rarely turn on their television because of the poisonous venom it spews.

Still the best!:
Although this book was written in 1986, it's still the best book of its type I've come across. It's pithy, focused, articulate, and smart, and devoid of the "academic gobbly-gook, turgid, quasi-illuminating, look how smart I am" school of scholarship. It's actually very well-written. If anything, Postman demonstrates that there are some social commentators who actually have a mastery of good English prose. Such talents were once considered important, say, in the way the oratory of Lincoln was or the satire of Mencken was or the smoothness of Orwell's style. Thus, in a sense, Postman's ideas are excellent, but what clinches his work for me is that he demonstrates that the written word really can thrive and convey meaning elegantly if we paid more attention. Unfortunately I think we're losing it to just the force Postman is suggesting: the mass media. Postman shows us that you can't write about society with elegance and intelligence just because you think a lot or think you know a lot. You should also brush up on your Shakespeare. Addendum! April 8 2004. Who would have thunk it? First pages of newspapers around the U.S. have reported a new study that powerfully links loss of attention span among infants in proportion to the amount of TV they watch.

Devastating and Funny:
Borrowing from Marshall McLuhan, Communication Arts professor Neil Postman adopts the thesis that the 'medium is the metaphor' by arguing that "each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, expression, and sensibility" (10). McLuhan argued that the medium is the message; Postman carries it one step further by demonstrating that the 'medium is the metaphor." He illustrates this by showing how the Cherokee Indians would communicate to multiple peoples separated by distance via smoke signals. While not knowing the nature of the discourse, Postman draws the inference that it probably did not contain philosophical argumentation because you cannot use smoke to do philosophy. The metaphor's form excludes the content (7). Postman illustrates this in the negative using the second commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing in heaven above, in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth. Wondering why God would make such a decree, Postman infers, "it is a strange injunction \osecond commandment\c to include in part of one's ethical system unless its author assume a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture" (9, emphasis his). This book is more relavant today than when it was first written. I live in a dorm and see people wasting their brains on video games (which I deem more dangerous than television). By the way, and I do not know how many reviewers caught this, Postman is not categorically bashing television. He notes how this has been a blessing in the lives of the elderly and the infirm. I thought this was a master stroke of sympathy and I commend him for it.

The problem is clear...who is to blame, though?:
Neil Postman takes the reader through a historical tour of how informative images are ruining our brains. The description of the problem is eye opening to say the very least, since it reduces the evening news to nothing more than labored stories that do not impact your life. The message really hits home when Postman himself admits that the junk on TV is the only thing worth watching, since it does not try to pull any punches. But the causes of our complacency in the age of technology goes back to another time. Way back, according to Postman. And it's a hard thing to grapple with especially since they are technological revolutions that, frankly and accurately speaking, we have never known a world without. THE PHOTOGRAPH + THE TELEGRAPH = DUMBER PEOPLES Okay, jesting aside, the photograph is the fail-safe way of representing an image of something that to people that they would normally not have the opportunity to see. And to most individuals, this is harmless. Not to Postman. In his eyes, photographs destroys whatever creative brain cells we had to begin with. Paintings and sculptures were filled with mystery and interpretations on unlocking said qualities. But with the photograph, it's there. It does the thinking for you The telegraph, although not in prominent use today (just substitute the internet in its place), was the baby that went out with the bathwater. Images and lightning fast communication are a deadly combination, so the story goes. And this is tough to swallow. Photographs and long distance telephone calls would never have been invented with the intention of bringing down the social pattern of humans, right? But the fact remains, according to Postman, that is precisely what these developments are doing. But he offers no real solution. If anything, Amusing Ourselves to Death almost acts as a hey-look-at-what-social-trend-I-just-discovered book without giving us a way out of the mess. And if every American is willing to accept that the telegraph and the photograph were menacing inventions, then maybe we can bulldoze our way towards Neil Postman's utopia. That is, if you agree with it.