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

by Neil Postman

the television news show entertains but does not inform,

the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.

is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it,

you never know who is watching, so it is best not to be wildly offensive.

What makes these television preachers the enemy of religious experience is not so much their weaknesses but the weaknesses of the medium in which they work.

not all forms of discourse can be converted from one medium to another.

If the delivery is not the same, then the message, quite likely, is not the same.

Television is, after all, a form of graven imagery far more alluring than a golden calf.

Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into our hearts, not abstractions into our heads.

In any sport the standard of excellence is well known to both the players and spectators, and an athlete’s reputation rises and falls by his or her proximity to that standard.

If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.

the television commercial has profoundly influenced American habits of thought.

capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment.

capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest.

The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them.

Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people.

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research.

His contempt was aimed at those politicians who would use sophisticated versions of the age-old arts of double-think, propaganda and deceit.

a world of television and other visual media, “political knowledge” means having pictures in your head more than having words.

Being a celebrity is quite different from being well known.

that the politician-as-celebrity has, by itself, made political parties irrelevant,

television does not reveal who the best man is.

This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.

the modern mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.

anxious age of agitated amnesiacs.

know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.”

information and ideas did not become a profound cultural problem until the maturing of the Age of Print.

Whatever dangers there may be in a word that is written, such a word is a hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press.

in a world of printing, information is the gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes to dampen the explosion.

the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.

Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture

that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut;

television clearly does impair the student’s freedom to read,

Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them.

Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian.

Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent.

We now know that Sesame Street encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street.

Whereas school is centered on the development of language, television demands attention to images.

every television show is educational.

If we are to blame Sesame Street for anything, it is for the pretense that it is any ally of the classroom.

television has by its power to control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.

Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present,

Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required.

there must be nothing that has to be remembered,

Of all the enemies of television-teaching, including continuity and perplexity, none is more formidable than exposition.

The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is entertainment.

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.

Wilson found that the average television viewer could retain only 20 percent of the information contained in a fictional televised news story.