When I picked up Neil Postman's 1985 landmark book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the librarian who brought it out to me at my Westminster CA local library commented that it was classic Sociology 101.
I'd taken Sociology 101 in 1957, decades earlier, when we were still astonished to be learning about white collar crime. I'd read Postman, his books on semantics and childhood, but not this particular book. Now I'm glad I have.
From Wikipedia, here's a brief synopsis of the origins of this work:
"The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control."
I thought reading Postman's book would help me to better understand how a failed casino builder and reality television host could ascend to the presidency of the United States. It certainly has.
In the preface, Postman's son, Andrew, asks us to recall 1985 when MTV was in its infanccy. And then think about how fast we have become bombarded with technological diversion that there's little time left for reflection. Rarely do you see a group of young people sitting around and chatting. Instead they hunch over their cell phones texting, swiping or playing games, ignoring those on either side of them.
Because I spent a decade in developing countries, 1987 through 1997, without TV, telephone, or nearby movie complexes, with few available newspapers or current magazines, I continued to rely on books and handwritten letters for information and diversion. It was only when I returned to the States and moved to Arkansas in 1998 that it struck me how much our culture had changed.
Though computers now sat on every desk, we went to each other's offices for discussions. It wasn't long before we began to email one another, though our doorways might be thirty steps apart. Then, by 2005 I learned my stepgrandchildren rarely checked emails...they communicated through their cell phones. A year later Twitter had been created. All this in a twenty-year span since Postman's book first came to public notice.
Chapter 9 of Amusing Ourselves to Death, tellingly is titled, "Reach Out and Elect Someone." In it he discusses how TV commercials have devastated public discourse. "By bringing together in compact form all of the arts of show business...music, drama, imagery, humor, celebrity...the television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital." Postman argues that Americans, even in 1985, had begun to accept political commericals as "a normal and plausible form of discourse."
Even those who aren't crazy about combat sports, such as American football, watch the Super Bowl to see the new commercials.
Now our national elections might hinge on which candidates spend the most dollars on commercials. Huxley had predicted this. Postman had nailed it. And our current White House incumbent is more preoccupied with "ratings" than with rising numbers of deaths in the USA related to Covid-19.
Postman posits that TV "presents information in a form that is simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual: that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.
I often see posted on Facebook, Twitter or commentary on news articles, in relation to politics, this message: "Time to grab the popcorn and sit back and watch the show."
"The show." The circus has come to town.
We may well finally have succeeded in amusing ourselves to death.
Love that last line!
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