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

by Neil Postman

Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.

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.

Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore—and this is the critical point—how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”

Such beliefs would naturally have implications for our orientation to political discourse; that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by the television commercial.

Political figures may show up anywhere, at any time, doing anything, without being thought odd, presumptuous, or in any way out of place.

or non-politicians may show up as politicians

Judged by this standard, blacks may be the only sane voters left in America.

censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.

have to wonder if david foster wallace read this

I refer, first, to the fact that television’s principal contribution to educational philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable.

Which leads to the second point I wish to emphasize: The consequences of this reorientation are to be observed not only in the decline of the potency of the classroom but, paradoxically, in the refashioning of the classroom into a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be vastly amusing activities.

when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

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.