The book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” by Neil Postman provides in-depth analysis and exploration why television and show business negatively affect our socialization. Postman pays special attention to the influence of television on the generation X which is the product of television nanny. As the author argues, generation X often fails to refer to reasoning skills and it is usually close to concentration and related skills. The book is very informative and analytic and the purpose of the author is to make people aware of the ill effects of television and show business. He is willing to say that we should not take TV success for granted and should concentrate on other more useful things. Furthermore, the author wants to illustrate that television makes us act mechanically abandoning our free will and desires.
The beginning of the book is, actually, an interesting and unusual comparison of visions. For example, in the Foreword, Postman compares the views of George Orwell in “1984” with that of Aldous Huxley in “Brave the world”. The author says that their views are equally chilly: Orwell argued that externally imposed oppression would definitely dominate in our world, whereas Huxley assumed that people freely rejected their history, maturity and autonomy in order to become oppressed by technologies which were gradually destroying their capacities to think. Postman agrees with Orwell and Huxley that such books shouldn’t be banned as they convey the truth. Huxley, in his turn, feared that there would be no reason to ban the books, but people wouldn’t be interested in reading them. In such a way people would be deprived of valuable information. In their view, technologies would give us too much and people would become passive and egoistic. Our love of technologies may ruin us.
Television and other technologies would destroy not only our historical values and believes, but also human morality. Postman supports these arguments claiming that television might conceal the truth from humanity by showing the “right” things. Simply saying, technologies will drown the truth in a “sea of irrelevance”. Orwell thought that people’s culture would become of captive nature and Huxley though people would become trivial and “preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bymblepuppy” – and they appeared to be quite right. (Foreword, vii, viii)
Postman says that media is a message which “denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world – but the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements”. (p.10) Media messages are likely to be metaphors which are working by powerful implication to enforce special definitions of our reality. Postman definitions are very strong and appealing. For example, he claims that “we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like” (p.10) and nobody will remain indifferent towards such statement. Apparently, every person inwardly is aware that technologies are ruining his/hers world, but many of us are afraid to admit it loudly. Nowadays it is media that re-constructs and re-shapes our culture.
What Postman is willing to show is that American society is experiencing great shift from telegraph to television, and, in the result, public discourse has become a dangerous nonsense. It is necessary to agree with the author as the ways ideas are expressed affect strongly our ideas and perceptions. Reality is terrifying as the spoken word has disappeared, but the written word has endured. It means that writing is more trustworthy than speaking.
The period the author selected for the book was the times when American mind was dominated by the sovereignty of the printed press. The Age of Exposition was a new age people weren’t familiar with, and, therefore, they appeared to be fully subjected to the powerful influence of the printing press. Exposition is defined “a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression”. (p.63) Postman states that typography amplified almost all ocharacteristics associated with maturity and public discourse. Typography played crucial role in exposition as it suggested abilities to think critically and reasonably; appreciation of reasons and order in society; capacities for detachment and objectivity; tolerance towards delayed response or no response. Nowadays the situation is opposite as people are constantly hurrying having no desire to wait even for a minute. The Age of Exposition began to pass toward the end of the 19th century and new Age of Show Business appeared on the stage showing decisiveness and persistence.
The telegraph was the first device to create the possibility of “a unified American discourse, but at a considerable cost”. (p.65) To defend his position Postman cites Henry David Thoreau who says that “we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate”. (p.65) So, the purpose of telegraph was to make relevance irrelevant because the flow of information passing through telegraph had little to do with the addressees. Simply saying, the information was irrelevant in addressee’s social and intellectual context. In other words, information environment is de-contextualizing. Postman assumes that “in a sea of information, there was very little of it to use”. (p.68) The telegraph made people a united neighborhood, but people appeared to be peculiar strangers with little or no knowledge of each other. The information sent gave no answers to the asked questions. Therefore, the author defines such world as the “world of fragments and discontinuities”. (p.70)
One of the most interesting chapters is “The-Peek-a-Boo World”, where the author critically examines innovations in technological sphere. Postman says that the world is mechanically reproduced imagery which inflicts American culture. All those photographs, advertisements, and posters were irrelevant for society. However, people became obsessed with new imagery which goal seemed to replace language and to provide new means for construing and testing reality. The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were marked as the age of electronic technique or a peek-a-boo-world. Postman views such world as empty and non-sense as this world isn’t interested in asking people and permitting them to do what they are willing. Technological world is hostile and make people self-constrained, though it is endlessly entertaining.
The final sections of the book are devoted to showing that television is hostile to typography’s way of knowledge. Postman claims that television aims at promoting triviality and incoherence in society. Television can’t be associated with seriousness and meaningness. Television is “only one persistent voice-the voice of entertainment”. (Alexander 2004) In the book Postman tries to show that American culture speaks in terms of great television conversation meaning that instead of developing cultural heritage, people are following and imitating TV images and words. In other words, television is re-shaping our culture making it a vast area for show business. Actually, that is what Orwell and Huxley expected to happen more than fifty years ago.
When reviewing the book, Sandra Alexander quoted the son of Farnsworth, television’s inventor: “There’s nothing on it worthwhile, and we’re not going to watch it in this household, and I don’t want it in your intellectual diet. I suppose you could say that he (Farnsworth) felt he had created a kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives”. (Alexander, 2004) The book offers original and unbiased study of ill effects of television. Researchers claim that television may cause dangerous impairment and its viewing use limited brain function. I can’t fully agree with the author’s point of view, but I have to appreciate and respect it. I don’t think that television is monster, but everything should be managed and controlled. The same is with television and show business. On the one hand, television helps us to see the world and new cultures, though, on the other hand, I agree it promotes passivity. However, apparent benefit of television is that it gives disabled people not to give up.
Works Cited
Alexander, Sandra. 2004. Review of ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business’ by Neil Postman. Available at http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3933.html Accessed November 26, 2007.
Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1985.
