FINISHED READING - Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

"What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience."*

Neil Postman, once a Professor of Communication Arts & Science at New York University, published this book Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 ** It has the subtitle Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  It's a detailed, thoroughly engaging examination of how technologies, and specifically television, have altered the nature of our communication and culture. Turning it from one based on printed communication and the authoritative written word, to one, which through the medium of television, sacrificed intellectual depth to immediacy, with little need for context or comprehension, why this is being communicated, or what this might mean in terms of how we respond. What we must do as a consequence, is a question rarely posed. 

Postman's book paraphrases Marshall McLuhan's maxim, that ' the medium is the message', and turns it into ' the medium is the metaphor'. The prevailing metaphor of elevision programming is entertaining, and is primarily focused on retaining your attention through constant visual stimulation. Anything educational or informative that it says it's imparting is entirely coincidental, irrelevant as a justification for its existence. Television isn't about encouraging thinking at all, but emoting, and the necessity for everything you watch to be enjoyable.

"And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference."*

Imagery, how things look dominate our daily perceptions and political discourses. Television has made the conveying of information a subservient quality, it has turned us into passive receivers of insufficient information, that we can do little or nothing about. It has made us feel impotent. The expression of opinions has changed from a rational carefully worded statement into an irrational emotive sensationalism. That Postman's book is still in publication forty years later, demonstrates how his analysis has found a continuing relevance in describing the causes and effects of our internet social media age, which was presaged by television.

" If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided their performance consistently generates a sense of verisimilitude......For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying."*

It is to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, that Neil Postman looked to speak of the zeitgeist of our time, and the perils our civilisation is currently facing. In Huxley's imagined future people become addicted to technologies, that subtly and quietly take away their capacity to think, their ability to form a critique or retain any sense of history, and the perspective that can bring to the present. Now, doesn't all that sound rather discomfortingly familiar?

"Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art, and so what the ABC network gave us was a picture of men of sophisticated verbal skills and political understanding being brought to heal by a medium that requires them to fashion performances rather than ideas."*

Postman uses famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A Douglas as an example for what has changed. In 1858 they engaged in a series of public debates.  At there height Lincoln would talk for three to four hours on a topic, Douglas would talk for a further three to four hours, to be followed by a concluding response of indeterminate length. And these talks were extraordinarily popular events, that were well attended. Thousands of people would stay engaged and listen intently. You could spend an entire day at these debates. There were breaks for meals where folk went home to eat, and then came back for the next bit of the debate.

American literacy and access to written information at that time was probably the highest it's ever been, The broad general population was well informed, and more than capable of following such long complex debates. Wind forward to modern televised political debates, where speakers get five minutes tops to state their case. This demonstrates how immediacy and the need to keep things moving lest the TV audience get bored, has changed our relationship with how much information we are presented with, or can take in. Add to this that every ten to fifteen minutes their will be the incongruous interruption of an advertising break and you have no clearer example of how television as a medium has messed with, and infantilises, our attention spans.

"And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?"*

Neil Postman undoubtedly was a very skilled and succinct communicator. ( He died in 2003)  Abjuring complex jargon, silly acronyms, specialist academic terms. He uses language and imagery deftly to aid comprehensibility and deeper understanding. And he was able to do all that without you ever getting a sense of being talked down to, or the subject matter being over simplified or dumbed down. This was a simulating book of ideas and perceptions, that took you on a journey into the inner workings of our modern communication media. He repeats several times that he is not implying what is happening is the result of a conspiracy or deliberate malign intent, what is happening to Western culture is a consequence of the essential nature of television itself, as a technological medium.

" Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.....To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a programme for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make assumptions that technology is always a friend to culture, is at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. "*

I found reading this book both compelling and curiously reassuring, simply because it nails quite precisely how we have arrived where we are today. When Presidents of the world's largest democracy are drawn from the world of entertainment, from film or TV reality programmes. Where a lack of seriousness, of being clearly ill informed, of blatantly lying, have become acceptable as just part of the political landscape. Because so long as you keep the attention span moving on, by bombarding the viewer with the next outrageous statement or provocation, people become increasingly numbed to the outrage. Advancing quickly on to the next sensationalised event that's just been generated. This would be a person that clearly understands the nature of modern tele- visual media, and how to exploit it. Enabling them to get away with dismantling democracy, create the foundations for a totalitarian state, and ignore climate catastrophe, whilst amusing the rest of us until we are all dead.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

* All quotations taken from Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, Published by Methuen, 1987. 

** With gratitude to Jared Henderson and his You Tube channel, for first making me aware of this book.