Book Review: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman

I’m pretty sure that Neil Postman would be devastated by the age of TikTok and other social media platforms. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he postulates that visually entertaining material is deteriorating our intelligence, attention span, and ability to comprehend what we read and hear. He insists that it’s destroying the political debate and the public discourse. I do agree with him; we only have to watch a debate from the 70s and compare it to our modern times, and we can see that there are attacks for and against personality and taste rather than the subject in an intelligent, argumentative way. The sad thing is that he states that the 70s were already far from what it used to be.

While I enjoyed reading the book, and I do agree with Neil Postman on the outcome, I found his argumentation shoddy. Take, for example, the idea he states as a fact that a photograph of a tree or any other subject cannot portray the meaning and feeling behind the actual picture or symbolize anything beyond the image, and because of this, the picture is meaningless and frivolous. That sounds like an opinion rather than a fact, coming from the limits of his imagination. The book was full of such argumentation that seemed to be drawn after the fact to support his opinion about television and media and how it affects our culture. It’s so easy to find supportive evidence for any statement we want to throw out there. You only have to frame the study, the point, or the quotation of what you want to say and let the reader read your framed view. So the one thing he calls for is argumentation and intelligent conversation, and I wonder, if I read one?

All that said, I wholeheartedly recommend reading this book. It makes a good point about the state of public discourse and where we might end up with our image-based fast culture. It’s a brave new world!

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a magical day!