Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Title: Amusing Ourselves to Death. Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Author: Neil Postman

Part One

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The Medium is the Metaphor

“American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of their display” p4

[An argument from Plato] “how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.” p6.

“To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wants, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television.” p8

[On the second commandment] ”It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.” p9

“the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations.” p9

“the clock made us into time-keepers, and the time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence towards the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.” p11

“metaphor suggests what a thing is like by comparing it to something else. And by the power of its suggestion, it so fixes a conception in our minds that we cannot imagine the one thing without the other” p13

Media as Epistemology

“Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.” p16 “Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.” p16

“In particular, I want to show that definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed.” p17 “Because of the ways it directs us to organize our minds and integrate out experience of the world, it imposes itself on our consciousness and social institutions in myriad forms.” [the medium; particularly its resonance] p18

“Judges, lawyers and defendants do not regard proverbs or sayings as a relevant response to legal disputes. In this, they are separated from the tribal chief by a media-metaphor.” p19 [tribal chiefs of cultures who do not have a written system].

“Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned.” p22

“we might add that every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development.” p24.

“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.” -p25

[In a print culture] “Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.” p26

Typographic America

Outlines the history of American communication through the printed word from the Mayflower to Tocqueville and argues that it shaped the structure of American life.

The Typographic Mind

Uses the famous Lincoln vs Douglas debates to describe the communicative norm of the time and the intellectual strength of American’s at the time to the typographic medium, i.e. print; how it shaped their discourse and aided in their ability to tackle detailed and long exposition and argument. “I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word analytic thought was not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterised by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas.” p51

“To attend school meant to learn to read, for without that capacity, one could not participate in the culture’s conversation.” p62

The Peek-a-Boo World.

The invention of the telegram changed the communicative medium and both provided “on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence” and “gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information” p65.

Reminds me of a similar belief, that “we have become more comfortable with knowing than thinking” - attribution forgotten.

“By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the ‘information-action ratio’.” p68

“The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly begin to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. ‘Knowing’ the facts took on a new meaning” p70

“Where people once sought information to manage the real context of lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. [on Crossword, etc.] p76