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

by Neil Postman

As late as 1890, advertising, still understood to consist of words, was regarded as an essentially serious and rational enterprise whose purpose was to convey information and make claims in propositional form.

In the 1890’s that context was shattered, first by the massive intrusion of illustrations and photographs, then by the nonpropositional use of language.

word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.

The 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 context-free information;

The penny newspaper, emerging slightly before telegraphy, in the 1830s, had already begun the process of elevating irrelevance to the status of news.

telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.

The telegraph may have made the country into “one neighborhood,” but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.

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

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

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence.

The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.

Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.

facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections.

To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.

The name “photography” was given to this process by the famous astronomer Sir John F. W. Herschel. It is an odd name since it literally means “writing with light.”

a 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.” You can only photograph a particular fragment of the here-and-now—a cliff of a certain terrain, in a certain condition of light;

“Pictures,” Gavriel Salomon has written, “need to be recognized, words need to be understood.”

the photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

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

the capacity of photographs to perform a peculiar kind of dismembering of reality, a wrenching of moments out of their contexts, and a juxtaposing of events and things that have no logical or historical connection with each other.

Like telegraphy, photography recreates the world as a series of idiosyncratic events.

Painting is at least three times as old as writing,

For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for believing.

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,

Television has achieved the status of “meta-medium”—an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well.

We do not doubt the reality of what we see on television,

the question of how television affects us has receded into the background.

Does television shape culture or merely reflect it?

the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane.

television’s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing;

Each technology has an agenda of its own.

television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.

American television, in other words, is devoted entirely to supplying its audience with entertainment.

television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.

Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.

television programs are embedded in music, which helps to tell the audience what emotions are to be called forth.

It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest;

Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself.

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.

Sesame Street is an expensive illustration of the idea that education is indistinguishable from entertainment.

the debates were conceived as boxing matches, the relevant question being, Who KO’d whom?

the leader of the free world is chosen by the people in the Age of Television.

In the ancient world, there was a tradition of banishing or killing the bearer of bad tidings.

several other features, including the fact that the average length of any story is forty-five seconds. While brevity does not always suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does.

Film footage justifies itself,

type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.

keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement.

Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.