Canonical · Media Theory & Information · Book

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."

The idea

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.

Why it works

The takeaway — recall it first

The Attention Merchants

"Wu traces how, from the first penny press to Instagram, the business of capturing and reselling human attention has grown into the dominant engine of media — and how every attention boom triggers a backlash that resets expectations about what should be free from capture."

Tim Wu · BookContinue→