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

by Neil Postman

Katz et al. found that 21 percent of television viewers could not recall any news items within one hour of broadcast.

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque.

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

An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan.

Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.

Many civilized nations limit by law the amount of hours television may operate and thereby mitigate the role television plays in public life. But I believe that this is not a possibility in America.

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. Such are the contradictions of a television-based culture.

The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch.

what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.