Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Andrew Postman (Introduction)

Cocky Ignorance about the world around us will eventually ruin usby Molly2

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November 21, 2009: When I was in the U.S. Army in the 1960's, I taught English to a dozen high school girls from Ewah High School, in Seoul, Korea. My tutoring was quite basic. One night I said, " I live in Knoxville, Tennessee ". One little Korean teen said shyly, " Ah, Knoxville, Tennessee: Headquarters of Tennessee Valley Authority ". I was bowled over with the students' knowledge of the geography of the United States. Looking back, I realize that this little episode is perhaps a metaphor for the sorry state of American education. We Americans are almost completely ignorant about the world around us, even of our own country. And our ignorance of our own, illustrious American history, is almost as deplorable. We have become a nation of people who don't seem to care what is going on in the world. And that, eventually, is going to do us in. Neil Postman illustrates our desire for mindless television viewing by giving numerous examples of the fluff and piffle that masquerades as

"news". Our Founding Fathers warned the American people that being a citizen requires full participation in the affairs of our nation, and subscribed to an informed citizenship. Thomas Jefferson said, " Dissent is the highest form of patriotism ". He would weep if he saw the cocksure ignorance of most Americans. "What Americans don't know will kill them", said Fred Friendly. one of television's major figures, many years ago. When we have a televison show that is called, " Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?", you know you are in deep trouble. How many Americans see the sad irony of this abomination? Postman was a prophet, and I am afraid he is absolutely correct that we are Amusing Ourselves To Death.

A review of Amusing Ourselves to Death, By Neil Postmanby Daniel-Oswald

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October 28, 2009: Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, is a book about social content. The message of the book is that our culture has moved past being a print based culture and is now a culture that is revolved around television.

The start of our cultural shift can be traced back to the nineteenth century, by means of when the telegraph was invented by Samuel Morse. This was one of the most important developments in communication at that time because for the first time in the history of man communication could move faster than man. With this came a change in media, because after the telegraph news could travel from one end of the country to another instantaneously.

In the end of part one of the book, Postman states that this made a "language of headlines" and that from these spawned the phrase "the news of the day". These are still used today on major television news channels where they run the headlines at the bottom of the screen separating them by the company's name. "The news of the day" is the top story of the network is covering in its broadcast. From this kind of broadcasting, we get fragments of the news; this is what Postman calls "Now. This", which Postman says also is signified by a broadcaster saying that he is done covering one story and is about to move onto the next.

The main focus of the book is on television, what television does for and to our culture. "Television is our cultures principal mode of knowing about itself," Postman says in the first chapter of the second part of the book. What this means is that the shows we watch become a part of us, it becomes the main place where we get information about our community, our country, and I'd make the argument that it is where we go to learn about other cultures too.

This is true for not only major news channels which I mentioned earlier but for different shows and sitcoms. The Travel Channel, for instance, has many of these kinds of shows that one watches if they would like to learn about the different cultures, shows like Bizarre Foods and No Reservations, where one can not only learn about the culture and foods of somewhere where they will probably never end up going but they are also entertaining to watch.

The entertaining factor of television is how Postman puts it in the second part of the book as "supra-ideology of all discourse on television." This meaning that even if what you're watching is suppose to be educational it is also entertaining. I strongly agree with this Postman statement because there is no way to turn on the television and not be attempted by the networks to be entertained.

Postman also mentions that we have news as entertainment, but now we have entertainment as news in the show Entertainment Tonight. It was seen that there was a need for us as a culture to not only be entertained by television but to have a program that is based on what those who entertain us are doing when they are not entertaining.

In the last chapter, Postman said that television turns everything on it into entertainment packages. In our society today we are so addicted to being entertained, television is an obvious medium that feeds that addiction. We can say that we are learning something from watching a program, like say one that is about Italy, but really we are being entertained by the music, the ruins of an ancient age, the sight of the sun going down on the Mediterranean Sea, and and the tidbits of information that the show is giving us will...