Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

by Neil Postman

To think about those men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge as codified in the printed word.

Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image,

Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.

difference between living in a culture that provides little opportunity for leisure, and one that provides much.

There would have been little casual reading, for there was not a great deal of time for that.

What reading would have been done was done seriously, intensely, and with steadfast purpose.

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

they assumed that participation in public life required the capacity to negotiate the printed word.

Women were probably more adept readers than men, and even in the frontier states the principal means of public discourse issued from the printed word. Those who could read had, inevitably, to become part of the conversation.

For two centuries, America declared its intentions, expressed its ideology, designed its laws, sold its products, created its literature and addressed its deities with black squiggles on white paper.

all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition:

But until the 1840’s, information could move only as fast as a human being could carry it;

In the 1840’s, America was still a composite of regions, each conversing in its own ways, addressing its own interests. A continentwide conversation was not yet possible.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse, America’s first true “spaceman.” His telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified American discourse.

the telegraph would create its own definition of discourse; that it would not only permit but insist upon a conversation between Maine and Texas; and that it would require the content of that conversation to be different from what Typographic Man was accustomed to.

telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence.

telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of contex...

The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.

The potential of the telegraph to transform information into a commodity might never have been realized, except for the partnership between the telegraph and the press.

While such “human interest news” played little role in shaping the decisions and actions of readers, it was at least local—about places and people within their experience—and it was not always tied to the moment.

the local and the timeless had lost their central position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance and speed.

It was not long until the fortunes of newspapers came to depend not on the quality or utility of the news they provided, but on how much, from what distances, and at what speed.

The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded.

most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.

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

Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

contribution of the telegraph

dignify irrelevance

amplify imp...

essentially inc...

world of brok...

broken att...

principal strength of the...

capacity to move information, not collect it, explain...

Books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized anal...

an attempt to make thought permanent

contribute to the great conversation conducted

But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents.

suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message.

Not unlike Twitter

The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form had startling characteristics:

sensational, fragmented, impersonal.

slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgott...

language was also entirely di...

The receiver of the news had to provide a meaning if he could. The sender was under no obligation to do so.

sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began 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, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.

Authenticity to subject- StP

that the photograph was to visual experience what the printing press was to the written word.

photography and writing (in fact, language in any form) do not inhabit the same universe of discourse.

The metaphor is risky because it tends to obscure the fundamental differences between the two modes of conversation.

photography is a language that speaks only in particularities.