Amusing Ourselves to Death Quotes

“Introduce an alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It is frightening to think that this may be so, that the perception of the truth of a report rests heavily on the acceptability of the newscaster . . . television provides a new (or, possibly, restores an old) definition of truth; The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. "Credibility" here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one or more) conveyed by the actor/reporter.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge’s famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Since intelligence is primarily defined as one's capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication. In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability. the wise Solomon, we are told in First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. In a print culture, people with such a talent are thought to be quaint at best, more likely pompous bores. In a purely oral culture, a high value is always placed on the power to memorize, for where there are no written words, the human mind must function as a mobile library. To forget how something is to be said or done is a danger to the community and a' gross form of stupidity. In a print culture, the memorization of a poem, a menu, a law or most anything else is merely charming. It is almost always functionally irrelevant and certainly not considered a sign of high intelligence.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We may take as our guide, here, John Dewey's observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education, "Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson, or the lesson in geography or history. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future." In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about *how* one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, "We learn what we do.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis—a theory, a vision, a metaphor—something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“But what I am claiming here is not that 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. To”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that 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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying. As”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is demanded of you as you read this book. You are required, first of all, to remain more or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this (with this or any other book), our culture may label you as anything from hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some sort of intellectual deficiency.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Terrence Moran, "yapısı gereği imajı ve parçayı güçlendirmeye yatkın olan medyayla tarihsel bir perspektif edinemeyiz" derken tam hedefi vurmaktadır. Moran'a göre kalıcılık ve bir bağlam olmayınca "elde bulunan bilgi parçaları mantıklı ve tutarlı bir bütün oluşturacak şekilde birleştirilemez." Hatırlamayı reddetmediğimiz gibi, hatırlamayı tamamen yararsız buluyor da değiliz. Onun yerine, hatırlamaya uygun varlıklar olmaktan çıkarılıyoruz. Çünkü, hatırlamak nostaljiden daha fazla bir şeyse eğer, kesinlikle bir bağlamsal temel; olguların onun için düzenlenip modellerin ondan çıkarılabileceği bir şey gerektirir. İmaj politikası ve anlık haberler ise böyle bir bağlam sunmaz. Bir ayna yalnızca bugün giydiklerinizi yansıtır. Dün giydikleriniz konusunda sessizdir.
Bu varsayımların bir anlamı varsa, o zaman Orwell bu noktada, en azından Batı demokrasileri açısından bir kez daha yanılmıştır. Orwell tarihin yıkılışını önceden görmüştü, ama bunu devletin yapacağına, Hakikat Bakanlığı türünde bir kurumun sistemli bir biçimde işe yaramayan olguları yasaklayıp geçmişin kayıtlarını sileceğine inanıyordu. Ancak Huxley'in daha doğru öngörüsüyle, hiçbir şeyin kaba yolla uygulanmasına ihtiyaç duyulmayacaktır. Halka bir imaj, ivedilik ve terapi politikası sunmayı amaç edinmiş, görünüşte hayırlı gibi gelen teknolojiler, tarihi aynı derecede başarılı biçimde, belki daha kalıcı olarak ve hiçbir itirazla karşılaşmadan yok edebilirler.”
― Neil Postman, Televizyon Öldüren Eğlence: Gösteri Çağında Kamusal Söylem

“Of course, like the brain itself, every technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he “is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes ... may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history.... For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“My point is that we are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the “Now ... this” world of news—a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply disappears. And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then? It is merely a rehash of old news, and there is nothing interesting or entertaining in that. The only thing to be amused about is the bafflement of reporters at the public’s indifference. There is an irony in the fact that the very group that has taken the world apart should, on trying to piece it together again, be surprised that no one notices much, or cares.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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

“It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television’s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing; that television’s conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase “serious television” is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It has been pointed out, for example, that the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century not only made it possible to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time. Eyeglasses refuted the belief that anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our minds are improvable. I do not think it goes too far to say that there is a link between the invention of eyeglasses in the twelfth century and gene-splitting research in the twentieth.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But 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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business