Amusing Ourselves to Death Quotes

“One would have thought that the school room is the proper place for students to inquire into the ways in which media of all kinds—including television—shape people’s attitudes and perceptions.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We know enough about language to understand that variations in the structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called “world view.” How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“To which I might add that questions about the psychic, political and social effects of information are as applicable to the computer as to television. Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology—that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data—will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the “truth” is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.”
― 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. I raise no strong objection to this fact (at least not here) and have no intention of launching into a standard-brand complaint against the corporate state. I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:

Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch.

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

“How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. 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. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the "information-action" ratio.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Intelligence does not have quantity or magnitude, except as we believe that it does. And why do we believe that it does? Because we have tools that imply that this is what the mind is like.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“...history can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“...just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work, image politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“all television news programs begin, end, and are somewhere in between punctuated with music...It is there, I assume, for the same reason music is used in theater and films - to create a mood and provide a leitmotif for the entertainment...as long as the music is there as a frame for the program, the viewer is comforted to believe that there is nothing to be greatly alarmed about; that, in fact, the events that are reported have as much relation to reality as do scenes in a play.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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

“television can be used to support the literate tradition.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Public figures were known largely by their written words, for example, not by their looks or even their oratory. It is quite likely that most of the first fifteen presidents of the United States would not have been recognized had they passed the average citizen in the street. This would have been the case as well of the great lawyers, ministers and scientists of that era. To think about those men was to think about what they had written, to judge them by their public positions, their arguments, their knowledge as codified in the printed word. You may get some sense of how we are separated from this kind of consciousness by thinking about any of our recent presidents; or even preachers, lawyers and scientists who are or who have recently been public figures. Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of a face, most likely a face on a television screen (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, almost nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture. It is also the difference between living in a culture that provides little opportunity for leisure, and one that provides much.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: 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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared
was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no
one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of
information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we
would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth
would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in
a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some
equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal
bumblepuppy. As Huxley re
marked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and
rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take
into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984,
Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New
World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. 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

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

“We know enough about language to understand that variations in the structures of languages will result in variations in what may be called "world view."
How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information. But the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency.

You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha'is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: 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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“I am also aware of television’s potential for creating a theater for the masses (a subject which in my opinion has not been taken seriously enough).”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is.”
― 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,”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We look at the television screen and ask, in the same voracious way as the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” We are inclined to vote for those whose personality, family life, and style, as imaged on the screen, give back a better answer than the Queen received.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In 1966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. “Politics,” he said, “is just like show business.”1 Although”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business