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

by Neil Postman

vocabulary of images is limited to concrete ...

photograph cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract. It does not speak of “man,” only of a man; not of “tree,” only of a tree. You cannot produce a photograph of “nature,” any more than a photograph of “the sea.”

By this he means that the photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

The universe offers no such categories or simplifications; only flux and infinite variety. The photograph documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible.

photograph also lacks a syntax, which deprives it of a capacity to argue with the world.

the photograph testifies that someone was there or so...

Photography is preeminently a world of fact, not of dispute about facts or of conclusions to be drawn from them.

all understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears. Language, of course, is the medium we use to challenge, dispute, and cross-examine what comes into view, what is on the surface.

When applied to a photograph, the question, Is it true? means only, Is this a reproduction of a real slice of space-time? If the answer is “Yes,” there are no grounds for argument, for it makes no sense to disagree with an unfaked photograph.

makes no arguable propositions, makes no extended and unam...

offers no assertions to refute, so it is ...

Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions.

But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.

capacity of photographs

peculiar kind of dismembering of reality,

wrenching of moments out of the...

That the image and the word have different functions, work at different levels of abstraction, and require different modes of response will not come as a new idea to anyone.

the mid-nineteenth century was the sudden and massive intrusion of the photograph and other iconographs into the symbolic environment.

The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language, but bid to replace it as our dominant means for construing, understanding, and testing reality.

The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself.

the photograph was the perfect complement to the flood of telegraphic news-from-nowhere

photograph gave a concrete reality to the strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names.

provided the illusion,

connection to something within one’s sens...

But the sense of context created by the partnership of photograph and headline was, of course, entirely illusory.

But if the event is entirely self-contained, devoid of any relationship to your past knowledge or future plans, if that is the beginning and end of your encounter with the stranger, then the appearance of context provided by the conjunction of sentence and image is illusory, and so is the impression of meaning attached to it.

!!!

This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use.

I mean to suggest here that a more significant legacy of the telegraph and the photograph may be the pseudo-context. A pseudo-context is a structure invented to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use. But the use the pseudo-context provides is not action, or problem-solving, or change. It is the only use left for information with no genuine connection to our lives. And that, of course, is to amuse. The pseudo-context is the last refuge, so to say, of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence.

told, for the Age of Exposition, not of new beginnings, but of an end. Beneath its dying melody, a new note had been sounded, and photography and telegraphy set the key.

“language” that denied interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued the irrelevance of history, explained nothing, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence.

It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.

we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them.

media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television.

To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology.

Social media is now

And most important of all, there is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television.

Through it we learn what telephone system to use, what movies to see, what books, records and magazines to buy, what radio programs to listen to. Television arranges our communications environment for us in ways that no other medium has the power to do.

we have been learning that the computer is the technology of the future.

Not wrong, but not accurate; the Internet is the future

an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well.

A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible.

Collective unconscious

Twenty years ago, the question, Does television shape culture or merely reflect it? held considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. The question has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture. This means, among other things, that we rarely talk about television, only about what is on television—that is, about its content.

the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe,

Social media

For the loss of the sense of the strange is a sign of adjustment, and the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have been changed.

adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete;

thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowl...

irrelevance seems to us to be filled...

incoherence seems emine...

television’s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing; that television’s conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase “serious television” is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment.

Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business.

Such a hope represents exactly what Marshall McLuhan used to call “rear-view mirror” thinking: the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one;

To make such a mistake in the matter at hand is to misconstrue entirely how television redefines the meaning of public discourse.