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

by Neil Postman

in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo

Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.

a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.

I want to show that definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it. Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life, Nietzsche remarked. To which we might add that every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development. Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.