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

by Neil Postman

The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

A pseudo-context is a structure invented to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use. But the use the pseudo-context provides is not action, or problem-solving, or change. It is the only use left for information with no genuine connection to our lives. And that, of course, is to amuse. The pseudo-context is the last refuge, so to say, of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence.

This speaks to the illusion of being 'informed' with troves of information that are only useful as a 'fun facts'

Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world—a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.

One can hardly overestimate the damage that such juxtapositions do to our sense of the world as a serious place. The damage is especially massive to youthful viewers who depend so much on television for their clues as to how to respond to the world.

Generations raised on the "Now…this" type of disconnected and contextless consumption can't take serious matters seriously because their mediums don't allow for reflection and undermine the serious nature of the event by optimizing flr the presentation of as many novel and amusing things as possible.