Amusing Ourselves to Death Quotes

“Radio, of course, is the least likely medium to join in the descent into a Huxleyan world of technological narcotics. It is, after all, particularly well suited to the transmission of rational, complex language. Nonetheless, and even if we disregard radio's captivation by the music industry, we appear to be left with the chilling fact that such language as radio allows us to hear is increasingly primitive, fragmented, and largely aimed at invoking a visceral response;”
― 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. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information-misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information-information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“This perception of a news show as a stylized dramatic performance whose content has been staged largely to entertain is reinforced by several other features, including the fact that the average length of any story is forty-five seconds. While brevity does not suggest triviality, in this case it clearly does. It is simply not possible to convey a sense of seriousness about any event if its implications are exhausted in less that one minute's time.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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

“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

“We may say that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and to 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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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

“It is my intention in this book to show that a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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

“Require all political commercials to be preceded by a short statement to the effect that common sense has determined that watching political commercials is hazardous to the intellectual health of the community”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“is an irony that I have confronted many times in being told that I must appear on television to promote a book that warns people against television.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“America is engaged in the world’s most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Walter 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

“The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest;”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Theirs was a “language” that denied interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued the irrelevance of history, explained nothing, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence.”
― 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”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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

“Now ... this” idea: the phenomenon whereby the reporting of a horrific event—a rape or a five-alarm fire or global warming—is followed immediately by the anchor’s cheerfully exclaiming “Now ... this,” which segues into a story about Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple or a commercial for lite beer, creating a sequencing of information so random, so disparate in scale and value, as to be incoherent, even psychotic.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Amusing Ourselves to Death is a call to action. It is, in my father’s words, “an inquiry ... and a lamentation,” yes, but it aspires to greater things. It is an exhortation to do something. It’s a counterpunch to what my father thought daily TV news was: “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

“Silence has been replaced by background noise. It’s a different world.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. 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

“In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“the assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“When we were first drawn together as a society, it had pleased God to enlighten our minds so far as to see that some doctrines, which we once esteemed truths, were errors, and that others, which we had esteemed errors, were real truths. From time to time He has been pleased to afford us farther light, and our principles have been improving, and our errors diminishing. Now we are not sure that we are arrived at the end of this progression, and at the perfection of spiritual or theological knowledge; and we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.1”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business