Amusing Ourselves to Death Quotes

“He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we’ll be overwhelmed by “information glut” until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as we’re being amused....”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“in the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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

“They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There is no parity here. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In the academic world, the published word is invested with greater prestige and authenticity than the spoken word. What people say is assumed to be more casually uttered than what they write. The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors. It is easier to verify or refute, and it is invested with an impersonal and objective character, which is why, no doubt, you have referred to yourself in your thesis as “the investigator” and not by your name; that is to say, the written word is, by its nature, addressed to the world, not an individual. The written word endures, the spoken word disappears ; and that is why writing is closer to the truth than speaking”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.”
― 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 remarked 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

“El mundo de Orwell es más fácil de reconocer y de oponerse a él que el de Huxley. Todo nuestro pasado nos ha preparado para reconocer y resistir una prisión cuando las rejas empiezan a cerrarse detrás de nosotros. (. . .) Pero ¿qué si no se sienten gritos de angustia? ¿Quién está preparado para luchar contra un mar de diversiones? ¿A quién y cuándo nos quejamos, y en qué tono de voz, cuando un discurso serio se disuelve en risas estúpidas? ¿Cuál es el antídoto para una cultura que se consume en risas?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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

“water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment:”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Advertising was, as Stephen Douglas said in another context, intended to appeal to understanding, not to passions. This is not to say that during the period of typographic display, the claims that were put forward were true. Words cannot guarantee their truth content. Rather, they assemble a context in which the question, Is this true or false? is relevant. In the 1890’s that context was shattered, first by the massive intrusion of illustrations and photographs, then by the nonpropositional use of language.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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

“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

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

“The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent,
mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a
tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news
as a commodity.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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 doctrine12 Audiences may have been moved emotionally by Edwards’ language, but they were, first and foremost, required to understand it. Indeed Edwards’ fame was largely a result of a book,”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from
the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself. 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. Even such an instrument as the microscope, hardly a tool of everyday use, had embedded within it a quite astonishing idea, not about biology but about psychology. By revealing a world hitherto hidden from view, themicroscope suggested a possibility about the structure of the mind. If things are not what they seem, if microbes lurk, unseen, on and under our skin, if the invisible controls the visible, then is it not possible that ids and egos and superegos also lurk somewhere unseen? What else is psychoanalysis but a microscope of the mind?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in our own times. Lewis Mumford, for example, has been one of our great noticers. He is not the sort of a man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "moment to moment." He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clock makers nothing at all. "the clock," Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of power machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes." In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created. In Mumford's great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, 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

“And, in the end, what will the students have learned? They will, to be sure, have learned something about whales, perhaps about navigation and map reading, most of which they could have learned just as well by other means. Mainly, they will have learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment, and ought to.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“But the telegraph demands that we burn its contents.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“There being no international copyright laws, “pirated” editions abounded, with no complaint from the public, or much from authors, who were lionized.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“other forms of conversation will always remain. Speech, for example, and writing.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“in oral cultures proverbs and sayings are not occasional devices:”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Television is not old enough to have matched printing’s output of junk.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“خشي أورْوِل من الذين سيحظرون تداول الكتب. أما هكسلي فقد خشي ألا يضطروا لمنعها، إذ لا أحد سيرغب في قراءتها.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business