Amusing Ourselves to Death
Neil Postman · 1985
"Postman argued television doesn't just carry trivial content, it makes serious content trivial by forcing it into an entertainment form — so the danger is not that we are fooled, but that we are delighted into not wanting to know."
Postman wrote in 1985 that Orwell feared we would be banned from truth; Huxley feared we would drown in irrelevance. He thought Huxley was the better prophet for television.
Each medium biases epistemology: print rewards sequential argument and footnote; television rewards brevity, image, and emotional tempo. When news, education, and religion migrate onto television's grammar, they become 'news as entertainment' — fascinating, forgettable, and incapable of sustained argument. Postman's test survives platform shift: if a medium makes you laugh every seven seconds, it cannot also make you think for seven minutes.
What was Postman's central warning about television as a medium?
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- Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)Neil Postman
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