Amusing ourselves to Death

Book Review (Neil Postman)

I'm late to this party. 40 years too late. Postman published this book in 1986, and reading it four decades later is incredibly depressing because of how not out-of-date it is, and how oh-so-right he was.

The book falls in two parts. The first part forms a coherent argument that the United States (and by extension the rest of the world) was undergoing a shift from 'the Age of Typography' to the 'Age of Television', and that on the whole thing. Repeated throughout is Postman's warning that while we were all worried about the dystopia of Orwell's 1984, we are in fact headed for Huxley's Brave New World.

The shift from print to television is not neutral nor benign, as chapter one "The Medium is the Metaphor" argues. Technologies create their own metaphors and shape our experiences of them. In fact, they shape our way of knowing (chapter two). This is one of the fascinating parts of the book, as Postman talks about what epistemology looks like in an oral culture, and then a literate culture. It's why I wrote that short post a while back about Proverbs. It's interesting to think about the Biblical texts as arising in oral cultures and yet being transformed into 'the Book(s)', which in turn gave rise or at least very significant impetus to the development of a literate culture.

"Since intelligence is primarily defined as one's capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication. In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity". What intelligence looks like in a print culture is quite different. It's the ability to digest and consume books and organise thoughts in written modes of discourse.

Postman makes three important caveats in chapter two. Firstly, that he's not arguing that the change in media creates a change in mental structures or cognitive capacities. It might do so, but his argument doesn't rely upon that so he's not making that claim. Secondly, that the epistemological shift of television is not yet complete. Thirdly, that his 'assault' on television is not totalising, but primarily directed towards its effects on public discourse. Postman is not claiming that television is always an evil, all the time.

The following two chapters make the historical case for Postman's claims. He discusses 'Typographic America', and just how literate Americans were and how this shaped public discourse. He looks at early literacy rates, book sales, etc., in colonial British North America. The way this influenced American civic and civil life, including the Revolution. He discusses the debate of Lincoln v Douglas in 1858: seven hours of oral debate which an audience happily and eagerly listened to, but one shaped by the norms of printed discourse, not oral culture.

The two great inventions that were the beginning of the shift were, for Postman, the telegraph and the photograph. Why? The telegraph begin to collapse distance and make communication possible over long distances at an instant. News from afar is rarely relevant to local decision-making and life, and so it becomes trivia. It became possible to know so much about far flung events, and do so little. The photograph, in turn, reproduces the particular, not the abstract, and a 'slice' of space-time, a syntax-less record of appearances without context. The two of these together began to reshape our modes of discourse, and find their unhappy marriage in television: instant communication paired with the primacy of the image.

Postman argues, that the medium of television promotes an epistemology of incoherence, trivia, and ultimately entertainment. It reduces everything to entertainment. And that's the case in part two of the book, as he takes area after area of public discourse and examines it in the age of television.

Part two, then, reads like a series of vignettes. He discusses entertainment per se, then news, religion, politics, and education. The argument of the first chapter here is that whatever else a television may or can do, it's very nature tends towards the production of a certain kind of culture. It has a bias, like all technologies. Television's bias is towards entertainment. "But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience." There's the rub; even at its 'best', television can't help but lean towards the entertaining, which undermines its claim to be anything but. Serious and reasoned discourse cannot take place on television, because television can't sustain it.

One of the effects of this is seen in the following chapter, "Now... This", we examines news in particular, and how television pushes us to take parcels of information, from human interest stories to pictures of genocide and famine, and fragment them without context, before packaging them up and moving on. More than this, apparent credibility becomes more important than actual reality. There's a prescient paragraph here: "I suspect, for example, that the dishonour that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar."

It is easy, far too easy, to draw lines from Postman to 2025 Trump, but they are still to be drawn. The US President is a notorious liar because the truth doesn't matter to him, nor does it matter to his supporters (a large slice of the American population). What matters is appearance, not substance. Which is why (at least partially) he bombed Iran - he was convinced by watching television that it would play well on television.

There is a similarly prescient section later in this chapter, when he discusses the emergence of 'disinformation' - not "false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information- information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads away from knowing. Again, 40 years on we are the heirs of two generations of both mis-information and dis-information. Right after this, we're given a 1983 article about the public becoming disinterested in Reagan getting things mixed up and wrong. We live in an age where Trump regularly appears to have no idea about basic facts, let alone complex political realities (how tariffs work, what a trade deficit means, the Constitution, that English is the main language of Liberia).

Walter Lippmann (1920): "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies".

The chapter on religion and broadcasting I found not very engaging, though I do have some wondering about the post-Covid effects of broadcasting services. Not enough thoughts to write meaningfully about it though.

The chapter that is actually on politics might be the second-most depressing though. The effect of television as entertainment and politics as show business reaches its zenith (= nadir) in that the most electable person is not the most excellent, but the one that appears most excellent. Politics is advertising. It is perhaps an irony that the presidents of both the USA and Ukraine are television actors. The former is the worst president of that country, the latter possible Ukraine's greatest leader so far.

There are some great lines in this chapter. Let me share a few:

television politics has added a new wrinkle: those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.

just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work, image politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason.

Again, the chapter on teaching was not the most interesting to me. Though Postman does have several attacks on Sesame Street!

It's the final chapter that is the most depressing, because in it, Postman returns to the Huxleyan thesis. We were so worried about 1984, we have the means to recognise Orwellian encroachments, but the Huxleyan dystopia sneaks in, seduces, and creates a prison with no guards and no gates: we keep ourselves inside that prison because we don't want to leave, not because we can't. And what's depressing about this chapter is that the only hope Postman offers up "at this late hour" is that the institutions of education, the schools, might create a form of resistance.

Forty years on, I wonder what Postman would think or say about our world: about the rise of the internet, about twitter, facebook, instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Obama, Trump, MAGA, etc. etc.. I can make some speculations. Postman was prophetic in his writing and we are living in the aftermath of his gloomy predictions. Television is still the drug of the nation and doom scrolling social media is its misbegotten offspring. We are the heirs of a world addicted to SOMA.

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