Amusing Ourselves to Death Quotes

“The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics are constantly urging television to do.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We rarely talk about television, only about what’s on television”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It would be a serious mistake to think of Billy Graham or any other television revivalist as a latter-day Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney. Edwards was one of the most brilliant and creative minds ever produced by America. His contribution to aesthetic theory was almost as important as his contribution to theology. His interests were mostly academic; he spent long hours each day in his study. He did not speak to his audiences extemporaneously. He read his sermons, which were tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions of theological doctrine”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase. The principle strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The modern idea of testing a reader's "comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to “join them tomorrow.” What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the “news” is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“How delighted would be all the kings, czars and führers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.”4”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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. No”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Where people once sought information to manage the real context of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930's and 1940's and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful "Trivial Pursuit." In one form or another, each of these supplies the answer to the question,"What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?" And in one form or another, the answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment—and cares. How delighted would be all the kings, czars and führers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as “it” is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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. To”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one’s habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. “An American,” he wrote, “cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes your bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an “immunity to eloquence,” meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure, or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author’s attitude toward the subject and toward the reader. You must, in other words, know the difference between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality of an argument, you must be able to do several things at once, including delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished, holding in mind questions until you have determined where, when or if the text answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your relevant experience as a counterargument to what is being proposed. You must also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and experience which, in fact, do not have a bearing on the argument. And in preparing yourself to do all of this, you must have divested yourself of the belief that words are magical and, above all, have learned to negotiate the world of abstractions, for there are very few phrases and sentences in this book that require you to call forth concrete images. In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales,”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“belief that where there is a problem, there must be a solution, I shall conclude with the following suggestions. We must, as a start, not delude ourselves with preposterous notions such as the straight Luddite position as outlined, for example, in Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Americans will not shut down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest that they do so is to make no suggestion at all. It is almost equally unrealistic to expect that nontrivial modifications in the availability of media will ever be made. 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. Once having opened the Happy Medium to full public”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business