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

by Neil Postman

context-free information;

elevating irrelevance to the status of news.

How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.

the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence.

A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past.

Unlike words and sentences, the photograph does not present to us an idea or concept about the world, except as we use language itself to convert the image to idea.

It does not speak of “man,” only of a man; not of “tree,” only of a tree.

And just as “nature” and “the sea” cannot be photographed, such larger abstractions as truth, honor, love, falsehood cannot be talked about in the lexicon of pictures.

the “pseudo-event,” by which he means an event specifically staged to be reported—like the press conference,

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

Television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection.

Perfection, until Social Media came along and showed how much more damage could be done.

no poverty so abject that it must forgo television.

Or a smart phone.

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.

Are we at that stage yet with Social Media? Maybe at the former and not the latter?

irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.

I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that 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.

I bring forward these quixotic uses of television to ridicule the hope harbored by some that television can be used to support the literate tradition.

every technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others.

first point that we are not talking about television as a technology but television as a medium. There are many places in the world where television, though the same technology as it is in America, is an entirely different medium

The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see.

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining,

no musical theme was used as background—a significant point since almost all television programs are embedded in music, which helps to tell the audience what emotions are to be called forth.

When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, “Let me think about that” or “I don’t know” or “What do you mean when you say . . . ?” or “From what sources does your information come?”

Each candidate was given five minutes to address such questions as, What is (or would be) your policy in Central America? His opposite number was then given one minute for a rebuttal. In such circumstances, complexity, documentation and logic can play no role, and, indeed, on several occasions syntax itself was abandoned entirely.

the demarcation line between what is show business and what is not becomes harder to see with each passing day. Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.

If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude.

To prepare myself for writing this chapter, I watched forty-two hours of television’s version of religion, mostly the shows of Robert Schuller, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker and Pat Robertson. Forty-two hours were entirely unnecessary. Five would have provided me with all the conclusions, of which there are two, that are fairly to be drawn.

Oh, my...; that is real sacrifice for the cause of truth.

on television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment.

Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not.

This is gross technological naivete. If the delivery is not the same, then the message, quite likely, is not the same. And if the context in which the message is experienced is altogether different from what it was in Jesus’ time, we may assume that its social and psychological meaning is different, as well.

The activities in one’s living room or bedroom or—God help us—one’s kitchen are usually the same whether a religious program is being presented or The A-Team or Dallas is being presented. People will eat, talk, go to the bathroom, do push-ups or any of the things they are accustomed to doing in the presence of an animated television screen.

This is a problem that was ignored (I did not see it discussed) in the rush to take worship services "online" via Zoom or streaming during the COVID pandemic. We are living with the consequences of that "momentary" discruption now, for how long?

the television screen itself has a strong bias toward a psychology of secularism. The screen is so saturated with our memories of profane events, so deeply associated with the commercial and entertainment worlds that it is difficult for it to be recreated as a frame for sacred events.

Not only does Schuller have celebrities on his show but his advertisements use their presence to attract an audience. Indeed, I think it fair to say that attracting an audience is the main goal of these programs, just as it is for The A-Team and Dallas.

There is no great religious leader—from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther—who offered people what they want. Only what they need.

I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.

on television, God is a vague and subordinate character. Though His name is invoked repeatedly, the concreteness and persistence of the image of the preacher carries the clear message that it is he, not He, who must be worshipped.

the danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows but that television shows may become the content of religion.

a public opinion poll on the question, Who is the best woman tennis player in the world?, is meaningless. The public’s opinion has nothing to do with it. Martina Navratilova’s serve provides the decisive answer.

If politics were like a sporting event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity, honesty, excellence.

I would venture the opinion that the traditional civil libertarian opposition to the banning of books from school libraries and from school curricula is now largely irrelevant. Such acts of censorship are annoying, of course, and must be opposed. But they are trivial. Even worse, they are distracting, in that they divert civil libertarians from confronting those questions that have to do with the claims of new technologies.

what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.

this point—that reading books and watching television differ entirely in what they imply about learning—is the primary educational issue in America today.

Or engaging in Social Media? I would like to see what Postman would say today about Social Media's implications for learning.

Teachers, from primary grades through college, are increasing the visual stimulation of their lessons; are reducing the amount of exposition their students must cope with; are relying less on reading and writing assignments; and are reluctantly concluding that the principal means by which student interest may be engaged is entertainment.

George Comstock and his associates have reviewed 2,800 studies on the general topic of television’s influence on behavior, including cognitive processing, and are unable to point to persuasive evidence that “learning increases when information is presented in a dramatic setting.”

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.

But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.

All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.

Ms. Babcock hopes that by watching television, people will learn that they ought to stop watching television.

It is an irony that I have confronted many times in being told that I must appear on television to promote a book that warns people against television.

Thus, a central thesis of computer technology—that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data—will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.