Amusing Ourselves to Death Quotes

“we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? Here”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV).”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln’s turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. 1 The audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid.”
― 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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital.”
― 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”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Our conversations about nature and about ourselves are conducted in whatever “languages” we find it possible and convenient to employ”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What could be stranger than the silence one encounters when addressing a question to a text? What could be more metaphysically puzzling than addressing an unseen audience, as every writer of books must do? And correcting oneself because one knows that an unknown reader will disapprove or misunderstand?”
― 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.”
― 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. To be able to do all of these things, and more, constitutes a primary definition of intelligence in a culture whose notions of truth are organized around the printed word.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life, Nietzsche remarked. To which we might add that every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development. Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented. 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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them to be.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“the assumptions controlling a news show are “that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism.”[3]”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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

“It may be of some interest to note, in this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use.”
― 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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing lots of things, not knowing *about* them. Thus to the reverent question posed by Morse - What hath God wrought? - a disturbing answer came back: a neighbourhood of strangers and pointless quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“the photograph was the perfect complement to the flood of telegraphic news-from-nowhere that threatened to submerge readers in a sea of facts from unknown places about strangers with unknown faces. For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequencing it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In the book [Postman] makes the point that there is no reflection time in the world anymore,” said a student named Jonathan. “When I go to a restaurant, everyone’s on their cell phone, talking or playing games. I have no ability to sit by myself and just think.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Wilson found that the average television viewer could retain only 20 percent of the information contained in a fictional televised news story. Katz et al. found that 21 percent of television viewers could not recall any news items within one hour of broadcast.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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

“reading Amusing Ourselves to Death in 2006, in a society that worships TV and technology as ours does, is nearly an act of defiance, one of those I-didn’t-realize-it-was-dark-until-someone-flipped-the-switch encounters with an illuminating intellect?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. We are not likely, for example, to be indifferent to the voices of the Sakharovs and the Timmermans and the Walesas. We take arms against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe and Jefferson. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? 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?
I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business