Post on Postman!

Last Thursday, I finished up my last class for the week and had to wait about an hour for my friend to come out of class so we could get home together. To bypass time, I decided to open up Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

As I sat down and began to read, I became drawn to what the book was about. Even though it was just the introduction by Postman's son Andrew, as well as a Foreword, I paid attention to the context. This occurred as I knew of the references to George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, thanks to previous knowledge in my academic career. I felt proud to have this previous knowledge with me as I had a better understanding of what the ideas presented.

Saturday evening rolls around, and after an evening with several close friends, I opened up my copy of Amusing Ourselves to Death to read of several referrals to Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; a few of the many key points found in the Philosophy course I took in my graduating high school year. Again, I am once more fascinated with many of the elements the book has had to portray, but I do admit there were other factors that I did not understand until I had to look them up.

One of the quotes I read from Postman made me think about what television really does to us. "Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it...What is television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce?" (Postman 84). Television redefines its purpose according to our behavioural changes, rather than providing messages we receive as ‘knowledge’. In other words, television definitely plays a part in terms of how we act, our self motivation, as well as attitude.

Before I finished reading, I disagreed with Postman on our world being similar to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World rather than George Orwell’s 1984. The Orwellian world portrays the government to be in control, where everything an individual does is conditioned. The dominance of the government in 1984 convinced me that our modern society can turn into this limited dystopia. It was not until nearing the end of the novel that I realized present day is more of Huxley’s Brave New World after all. “The President does not have the press under his thumb...Lie shave not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused to indifference...Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions” (110). Television presents what we want to see, and the media pays attention to society’s demands; it works both ways on how television and society function. Postman presents evidence by paralleling Huxley with Orwell on their views of society portrayed in both novels. Huxley had the more accurate type of dystopia whereas Orwell’s dystopia features the government taking over our lives completely by feeding continuous lies. I believe Postman was right in a sense that television provides us with entertainment which we see as “news”. This shows the media and television provide us with our demands (our entertainment). This becomes a part of the information we believe to be actual news.

I enjoyed this read about media culture and how society gets a dosage of corruption and manipulation. Corruption in our society only goes as far as we allow it to happen, similar to how far we let television feed us our information.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1986.