Abstract
Image-based media prioritise entertainment and appearance. Postman argues that we are not censored but distracted: vivid, decontextualized images and sound bites replace logical exposition, turning news, politics, education, and religion into entertainment and undermining democratic judgment. His remedy is to revive literate habits: reading, sustained argument, and critical education.
Context
Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985. It was influenced by several philosophical currents:
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan’s influence on Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is foundational. Both thinkers treat media as active shapers of perception and public life rather than neutral conduits for content. Postman adopts McLuhan’s core insight (that the form of a medium determines how content is experienced) and applies it to a civic and pedagogical argument, insisting that the medium of television produces different kinds of public discourse than print.
McLuhan’s aphorism “the medium is the message” underpins Postman’s shift from criticising specific media content to criticising media form. Where McLuhan emphasised how media create environments that privilege certain sensory modes and cognitive habits, Postman uses that framework to contrast print culture (which encourages linear, reasoned argument and sustained attention) with television culture (which privileges image, brevity, and emotional immediacy).
Methodologically, Postman inherits McLuhan’s historical-comparative approach: tracing how changes in communication technologies reorganise consciousness and institutions. Postman follows McLuhan’s pattern of diagnosing media-driven shifts in attention and cognition, but he moves further into normative territory, arguing explicitly that these shifts have corrosive effects on democratic deliberation and education.
Postman also leans on McLuhan’s idea of sensory bias. McLuhan’s claims about how print privileges visual-linear processing while electronic media emphasise simultaneity and sensory overload help Postman explain why television’s visual immediacy promotes spectacle and entertainment over sustained logical exposition. This sensory emphasis supports Postman’s central claim that television transforms serious discourse into amusement.
Finally, though Postman extends McLuhan’s descriptive insights, he differs in tone and purpose. McLuhan was often aphoristic and diagnostic. Postman is didactic and prescriptive, using McLuhan’s framework to argue for the preservation of literate practices and for civic education that recognises media’s formative power.
Habermas’s influence on Neil Postman appears mainly through shared concerns about the conditions for rational public discourse and the deterioration of the public sphere under mass-mediated communication. Postman adapts Habermas’s normative framework, especially the idea that a healthy public sphere requires spaces for rational-critical debate, to argue that changes in media form have eroded those conditions.
Habermas’s concept of the public sphere (a discursive arena where citizens deliberate as equals, using reasoned argument to form public opinion) provides Postman a standard against which to judge media effects. Postman treats print-based culture as historically more conducive to that model because print fosters linear argument, sustained attention, and common referents. He presents television as inimical to the practices Habermas deems necessary for legitimate democratic will-formation, since television privileges image, entertainment, and fragmentation over reasoned exchange.
Methodologically, Habermas’s emphasis on the institutional and communicative preconditions of democracy informs Postman’s focus on media as structural forces rather than merely channels of information. Postman uses this lens to link changes in media form to changes in civic institutions (politics, journalism, education, religion), arguing that when media no longer support rational-critical discourse, the very legitimacy and functionality of democratic deliberation are undermined.
Where they diverge is that Postman is less focused than Habermas on detailed institutional analysis (e.g., legal, economic, or bureaucratic structures) and more on rhetorical and cultural consequences of media form. Habermas offers a more systematic theory of communicative action and the distorting effects of system imperatives (e.g., market or administrative logic) on the lifeworld; Postman translates those concerns into a media-centered critique emphasising pedagogy, public attention, and civic competence.
Habermas supplies the normative benchmark and much of the conceptual language — public sphere, rational-critical debate, conditions of legitimacy — that Postman mobilises to argue that television, by reshaping communicative conditions, impoverishes democratic discourse.
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School’s influence on Neil Postman is evident in his critique of mass-mediated culture and its effects on critical consciousness. Postman echoes the Frankfurt School’s worry that culture produced for mass consumption, shaped by commodification and entertainment logic, tends to standardise experience, blunt critical faculties, and integrate citizens into systems of passive consumption rather than active critique.
Key Frankfurt ideas show up in Postman’s diagnosis: the “culture industry” thesis (Adorno and Horkheimer) about how cultural goods are manufactured to perpetuate ideological conformity parallels Postman’s claim that television turns news, politics, and education into entertainment products that discourage reflective judgment. Like the Frankfurt thinkers, Postman sees commercialisation and the logic of the market as central mechanisms that transform serious discourse into spectacle.
Methodologically, Postman shares the Frankfurt School’s interdisciplinary scepticism toward technological and capitalist progress narratives. He combines rhetorical analysis, cultural history, and moral critique to show how media forms reorganise public life, similar in spirit to the Frankfurt project of linking cultural forms to social power and domination. However, Postman is more focused on media form (print vs. television) and pedagogy, whereas the Frankfurt School situates culture within broader capitalist, ideological, and psycho-social structures.
Postman differs from some Frankfurt writers in tone and prescription: he is less fatalistic and more educationally oriented, urging the preservation of literate practices and civic education as counterweights to television’s effects. Nonetheless, the Frankfurt School’s central concerns about commodified culture, passive consumption, and the erosion of autonomous critical thought clearly inform Postman’s argument.
Walter J. Ong
Ong’s work on orality and literacy shaped Neil Postman’s argument by supplying a historical and cognitive framework for how changes in dominant media reorganise thought and public discourse.
Ong demonstrated that oral, literate, and electronic media create different cognitive habits and social practices: orality emphasises memory, performance, and communal context; literacy fosters abstraction, linearity, and analytic argument; electronic media reintroduce simultaneity and sensory immediacy. Postman borrows this schema to contrast a print-based public sphere, whose literate habits support sustained, reasoned argument, with a television-dominated culture that privileges image, brevity, and emotional immediacy.
Ong’s historical method (tracing shifts in consciousness as communication technologies change) legitimises Postman’s comparative-historical move from nineteenth-century print culture to twentieth-century televised culture. Postman uses Ong’s evidence about how literacy restructures cognition to argue that the decline of print practices undermines the habits (attention span, sequential logic, respect for text) that democratic deliberation requires.
Ong’s nuance about media not being merely technologies but cultural formations helps Postman argue that television is not simply a new delivery system for the same content. Its sensory and structural biases actively reshape how citizens process information and evaluate claims. Postman adopts Ong’s insight while applying it normatively to education and civic life, urging preservation of literate practices to maintain conditions for rational public discourse.
The Rhetorical tradition
The rhetorical tradition shapes Postman in method, concepts, and normative aims. He treats media as rhetorical environments that enable or disable particular forms of persuasion, argument and public reasoning.
Postman draws on core rhetorical distinctions — ethos, pathos, logos — and on classical concerns about audience, medium and style. He analyses television as a dominant rhetorical form that privileges pathos (emotion, spectacle) and ethos (image, persona) over logos (sustained argument), showing how that shift reconfigures what counts as persuasive public speech. That rhetorical framing lets him move beyond content critique to examine how form shapes the kinds of arguments that can succeed in public life.
The tradition’s emphasis on audience and purpose informs Postman’s attention to how different media presuppose different audiences. Print presupposes a reflective, attentive reader capable of following a linear argument; television presupposes a distracted, visually oriented viewer responsive to mood and sensation. Postman uses rhetorical conventions (kairos/timing, arrangement, delivery) to show why televised formats produce sound bites, staged performances, and fragmented attention rather than deliberative debate.
Methodologically, Postman adopts rhetorical analysis — close reading of genres (news, politics, religion, education) and evaluation of their persuasive mechanics — rather than purely technological or economic explanation. This lets him assess civic consequences in terms of persuasion quality: whether discourse fosters judgment and critical reasoning or merely entertains and manipulates.
Normatively, the rhetorical tradition supplies Postman’s standards for good public discourse (clarity, logical structure, appeal to reason). His defence of literate practices is a defence of rhetorical virtues: argumentative rigour, respect for evidence and sequential exposition, and civic education that cultivates rhetorical competence.
In sum, the rhetorical tradition gives Postman the tools to diagnose how media forms condition persuasion, to compare genres across media and to argue that television’s rhetorical biases undermine the norms and practices required for democratic deliberation.
Summary
Foreword
Postman begins his book by summarising George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, as well as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
The author reframes George Orwell’s 1984 not as a simple prophecy of brute surveillance but as a warning about control over information, language, and the public mind. He stresses that Orwell’s real threat was the political manipulation of truth, how altering definitions, normalising contradictions, and narrowing language (as in Newspeak and doublethink) can limit thought and render people more governable.
Postman contrasts Orwell’s world of scarcity and censorship with Aldous Huxley’s vision in Brave New World, arguing that our media environment more closely resembles Huxley’s: an overload of trivial, pleasurable information that drowns out serious discourse. That abundance of shallow information, he warns, can be as dangerous as overt censorship because it prevents citizens from developing coherent, critical understandings of public life.
Postman points out that these authors, though they both imagined a grim future, didn’t “prophesy” the same thing. Orwell predicts that we will be oppressed, not just in our actions but in our very thoughts, by the external forces of governmental control. Huxley, on the other hand, imagines a world where our internal weaknesses and desires to be entertained and pleasured drive us to laziness, stupidity, and intellectual incompetence.
“In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
Central to Postman’s critique is the role of television and mass media in transforming important matters — politics, education, news — into entertainment. When public issues are presented primarily as spectacle, reasoned argument and factual standards are displaced by image, emotion, and short-form sensation, and the public’s capacity for sustained critical thought atrophies. He does not argue that technology by itself enslaves people. Rather, technologies reshape the forms of communication and the kinds of thought they encourage, producing predictable social and political consequences. For democracy to function, Postman contends, it requires shared facts, meaningful public discourse, and citizens equipped to evaluate claims. Both censorship and trivialisation erode those prerequisites, undermining accountability and enabling manipulation.
Postman closes his foreword with the provocative contention that Huxley was right.
Chapter 1
Postman opens this chapter by recounting various anecdotes illustrating that American thinking has become trivial. Politicians, writes Postman, are praised for their looks or physique. Televised journalism has led to an increasing emphasis on style and appearance. Advertising has preyed on our decreasing attention spans and made us hungry for entertaining quips rather than substantive information and knowledge.
Postman goes on to acknowledge that this isn’t even a groundbreaking set of observations: these worries are quite cliché. But, he contends, we have not adequately accounted for the reason culture is headed in this direction. He maintains that we need to keep in mind the relationship between form and content in public discourse. Without certain forms of media, certain content would not exist. For example, without technologies of image (photography and television), a politician’s or a reporter’s appearance simply could not reach a large audience. Thus, conversations about style and appearance would be effectively absent from the dominant cultural discourse.
Here Postman invokes media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who famously argued “The medium is the message.” This means that the content of any medium (a book, television show, radio show, or live speech) will be determined by the form of the media that presents it. Postman believes that McLuhan, like Orwell and Huxley, “spoke in the tradition of prophecy.” Postman was once a student of McLuhan, and he reassures his reader of his immense respect for McLuhan’s thinking, but he proposes a slight alteration to McLuhan’s famous argument. The medium, contends Postman, is the metaphor. Postman believes that media communicate in ways that are indirect. If media strictly delivered “messages,” then people would be better able to see media’s importance to culture.
Not only do technological media affect their own content, but they also extend their influence outward into the rest of culture, says Postman. Eyeglasses, a technology that improved human sight, are probably in some way to thank for our ambition regarding the human genome project. Eyeglasses told us that the body can be improved through science. Gene research is an extension of the same idea. Microscopes told us that there is an invisible, teeming world not accessible to the naked eye and Postman suggests that psychological insights about the subconscious then grew out of the medium of microscopy. Postman concludes the chapter by saying:
“our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.”
Chapter 2
This chapter concerns the transition between print culture and television culture in the US. Postman believes that when people got their information from the printing press, cultural conversations were rational, sustained, and logical. Now, he says, under the governance of television, America “has become shriveled and absurd.”
He begins to support this claim with a discussion of a “tribe in western Africa” whose criminal justice system relies heavily on a judge’s memorisation of thousands of moral aphorisms or sayings. When a crime is committed, the judge finds an applicable aphorism, and determines a just course of action based on the wisdom of that aphorism. Postman notes that, in an oral culture, aphorisms are an acceptable source of truth or wisdom.
In a print culture like America, however, aphorisms are considered unserious. Postman illustrates this with a hypothetical imagining of a lawyer using aphorisms in a courtroom instead of documented evidence. Because we can print and record ideas, we are not limited by the difficulty of memorisation and can therefore rely on much longer texts and accounts to determine truth. If something is written, published, and disseminated, it is more true than if something is simply uttered. Thus, says Postman, media determine our epistemology (theory of knowledge, or what distinguishes knowledge from opinion). In other words, our media determine what we consider to “count” as knowledge and truth.
Postman maintains that not all epistemologies, or systems of knowledge and truth, are created equal. He says that in his country print culture is declining in favoir of “television-based epistemology.” Postman says this shift has resulted in our “getting sillier by the minute.” In other words, since media determine what we consider knowledge, and since our intelligence is a function of our knowledge, our collective intelligence as Americans is being (negatively) impacted by a shift from print to television.
Chapter 3
Postman discusses the growth of printed book distribution in the 17th century, and specifically its importance to early American colonial culture. “No literary aristocracy emerged in Colonial America,” says Postman. He notes that literacy rates varied relatively little between the poor and the rich and even between men and women, which was particularly unusual in that moment in history. Postman talks about the consequences of such a literate culture and notes that a particularly telling example of Colonial America’s literacy is the distribution of Thomas Paine’s tract Common Sense.
Common Sense sold over 100,000 copies in the space of just a few months and the total copies sold approached 3 million. In 1985, at the time of Postman’s writing, a book would have to sell 24 million copies to be said to have done comparably well. Postman remarks,:
“the only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today's America is the Superbowl.”
As America moved into the nineteenth century, Postman continues, it did so as a fully print-based culture in all of its regions. Literature, newspapers, and pamphlets were ubiquitous. Intellectual, popular, working-class, aristocratic—all spheres of culture revolved around print media in their own way.
“When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, his reception equalled the adulation we offer today to television stars, quarterbacks, and Michael Jackson.”
Postman notes that even lectures — spoken words — took on the quality of print. Lectures and debates didn’t sound like idle conversation— they sounded like writing. Spoken sentences were longer, more complex, and more rigorously logical, and listeners, whose minds were used to this kind of print-based language, were able to digest and follow this kind of spoken print.
Postman furthers his argument: The reason the content of culture was so sophisticated at that time is that printed information had a kind of monopoly. If you wanted to exchange ideas, you did so in a pamphlet, a debate forum, or a lecture, all places where the form of printed language lent itself to a more sophisticated and elegant content. Postman says it is important to continue to investigate how the printing press shaped colonial American epistemology, in order to address the problem of the decline (according to Postman) of rational conversation in 20th century America.
Chapter 4
Postman recounts the debates that took place between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in August 1858. Douglas spoke for one hour, then Lincoln replied for an hour and a half. Postman wonders “What kind of audience was this?” He marvels at the ability of Lincoln and Douglas’s audience to sit through hours of oratory from people who were not even, at the time, officially presidential candidates. Postman is confident that contemporary audiences could never give their time and attention the way audiences did then.
Postman also analyses the speech of Lincoln during the debate. Postman quotes a particularly long and logically complex sentence from Lincoln, and notes that contemporary politicians are far less likely to speak like this, either because they can’t, or because they are wary of being incomprehensible. People of television culture, says Postman, need “plain language.” This sets us apart in a fundamental way from 19th century Americans, for whom:
"the use of language as a means of complex argument was an important, pleasurable and common form of discourse in almost every public arena.”
Postman then says it is important to remember that the written word “has a content” that is semantic and paraphraseable. He notes that this may sound odd or obvious, but contends that it is important to his argument. The fact that writing has a paraphraseable content means that it inherently asks to be understood: to be worked through and grappled with by its audience. This is why Postman calls the language of print “serious business.” It is, according to him, fundamentally rational. He writes:
“It is no accident that the Age of Reason coincided with print culture.”
Postman then extrapolates that great men of the past — thinkers, orators, politicians, intellectuals — were required to be well-versed and logical, and their audiences were required to do the work of understanding printed language. He adds that great preachers of the 18th and 19th centuries were all men who were exceedingly well-versed in scripture and whose appeal grew out of their refined intellect. He compares this to the contemporary, commodified “megachurch” figures whose zealotry is often precisely anti-intellectual.
Chapter 5
Postman opens the chapter with a discussion of how the invention of the telegraph marked a fundamental shift in American culture.
“The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography's definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence.”
The telegraph, he says, made non-contextualised information acceptable, for the first time it made information into a pre-packaged, easily digestible commodity.
What’s more, since the telegraph defeated the problem of disseminating information across vast spaces, it also introduced geographically irrelevant information into cultural dialogue. He says that
“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.”
Postman turns to question his reader, wondering how many times the news he or she consumes daily impels them to any kind of action that they would not have otherwise taken. This rhetorical question then launches a new critique of image culture: information is no longer delivered in the service of any action. We absorb the news every day, but the information is impotent, says Postman, because it has no effect outside of capturing our attention for a short time. Postman says this problem is predicted by the telegraph because “to the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”
Postman moves on to a discussion of the photograph. He first notes that etymologically, “photograph” means “writing with light.” He says this is perhaps ironic, given that photography and writing, he will argue, have nothing in common. He claims that photography, on its own, can only deal with concrete particularities. It cannot deal with abstract, remote, internal, or invisible content. What’s more, photographs, like the telegraph, isolate information from its context. Nothing outside the frame of the photograph is visible.
Photography would, in Postman’s account, end up launching a kind of assault on written language. Postman uses the word “assault” because, as he sees it, photography did not position itself as a supplement to language and print, but as a replacement of it. Newspapers and advertisers immediately recognised the power of the photograph to captivate audiences. Print started to recede from the front page of the newspaper as front-page photographs grew larger, and advertisers cashed in on public appreciation of pre-packaged, decontextualised images. And thus, “For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, became the basis for believing.”
Postman then argues that the photograph and the telegraph gave each other a pseudo-context. Brief sound bites of language, accompanied by a photographic image, became a popular item of consumption, whether in politics, entertainment, or advertising. But this pseudo-context is only a false refuge of sorts, for a culture “overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence.”
Print culture was not annihilated in one fell swoop, though, says Postman,
“In the novels and stories of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Hemingway, and even in the columns of the newspaper giants — the Herald Tribune, the Times — prose thrilled with a vibrancy and intensity that delighted ear and eye. But this was exposition's nightingale song, most brilliant and sweet as the singer nears the moment of death.”
And the problem is certainly intensifying, Postman says. As new generations are born who literally don’t know of a life without television, the dominance of television culture is seemingly secured as indelible.
Postman takes a moment to address a technology that is still in its early stages: the computer.
“We are told that we cannot run our businesses, or compile our shopping lists, or keep our checkbooks tidy unless we own a computer. Perhaps some of this is true. But the most important fact about computers and what they mean to our lives is that we learn about all of this from television.”
Television, says Postman, will remain dominant because it is how we get all of our information. It is our way of knowing about the world.
Postman wraps up the chapter by noting that the culture of the image, the relentless decontextualisation and irrelevancy that saturates our everyday lives, goes basically unnoticed. In other words, there seems something totally natural about this kind of communication of information. This, contends Postman, is the most pernicious effect of television culture: to make that which ought to seem strange into something apparently natural. His goal, he says, is to “make the epistemology of television visible again."
Chapter 6
Postman begins the chapter by dismissing the idea that television could extend or augment the intellectual traditions of other media. He says this is an example of what McLuhan called “rear view mirror thinking,” where we attempt to define new technologies by past ones. Postman says definitively that television does not extend literary culture, but rather attacks it directly.
The claim of this section is that television is not only entertaining, but also responsible for making entertainment the “natural format for the representation of all experience.” Postman’s claim is that television has made the consumption of entertainment (as opposed to reason or rationality) more important than communication of information. Information, in television culture, is always entertaining.
Postman turns to the example of supposedly “serious” discourse on television: broadcast discussion between great world figures like Henry Kissinger, Elie Wiesel, and others, which have taken place on stations like ABC. But televised discussions, even when they take place between serious people, never have a quality of real seriousness. Because time is so limited and because conversations are interrupted by advertisements, it becomes impossible to have a deeply contextualised discussion. This means that conversations on television rarely build from one point to the next. They rather take the form of various disjointed perspectives delivered in succession.
“At the end, one could only applaud those performances, which is what a good television program always aims to achieve; that is to say, applause, not reflection.”
“Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore, and this is the critical point, how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. Entertainment doesn’t simply prevail on the television screen. It prevails in all other spheres of culture. Americans no longer talk to each other, so much as they entertain each other.”
Chapter 7
Postman says there is a phrase for which should perhaps be considered one of the most troubling in the English language. “Now…this” is often used as a transition between subjects on radio or television broadcasts. Postman says it indicates that what you have just heard has no consequence, and what you are about to hear has no context. Television, however, did not invent what Postman calls the “Now…this” worldview. He hopes to have shown that it has its roots in telegraphy and photography. But television is responsible for putting the “now…this” worldview into its “boldest and most embarrassing form.”
Postman says we live in an age where the most trusted news reporters are the most attractive or well-styled ones. Credibility, he says, has replaced reality as the criterion for truth. If information comes from a credible person, it is accepted as true. (It used to be the case that if information reflected reality, it was accepted as true.)
“The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.”
Postman says that America is a place of “disinformation.” This doesn’t mean incorrect information, but rather information that doesn’t actually serve to inform. It is too disjointed and decontextualised to do so.
For all his perspicacity, George Orwell would have been stymied by this situation; there is nothing ‘Orwellian’ about it. Huxley, on the other hand, would not be surprised in the least at the current state of affairs in America. The information environment in the US looks to Postman like a game of Trivial Pursuit. Postman says it is uncertain if a nation can survive on 22-minute spurts of information, if it considers the news valuable only when it produces laughs or applause.
Chapter 8
This chapter concerns the preaching of evangelical pastors. Postman looks in particular at Reverend Terry, Pat Robinson, and Jimmy Swaggart. They are all capable of delivering what Postman calls the “perfect television sermon.” They are theatrical, emotional, and comforting. This chapter thus concerns “television’s version of religion.”
Postman claims that religion, like anything else, undergoes a fundamental change when it becomes televised. When we watch a preacher deliver a sermon on television, we are always capable of, at the push of a button, changing the channel or shutting the screen off. Thus a certain kind of secularism hangs over televised religion, as the secular world is only a split second away. Since televised preachers know this, they must make their programming compete with other programming. They offer it at convenient hours, and spice up their sermons with entertainment.
This ought to upset us, says Postman, because television has thus turned religion into something that gives us what we want, not something that gives us what we need. Postman’s worry is not that religion is becoming the content of television shows, but that television will become the content of religion.
Chapter 9
This chapter begins by suggesting that television is the enemy of capitalism. Capitalism relies on the ability of consumers to choose the product that best addresses their needs. Postman says that
“Indeed, we may go this far: The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.”
Therefore advertising no longer concerns what consumers know about products, but rather what advertisers know about “the market.”
Postman calls television advertisements “instant therapy.” In the span of 15 to 20 seconds, the viewer feels as though his or her needs have been addressed and that feeling is good enough for American consumers raised in the age of show business.
Television advertising also has profound effects on politics. Consumers “choose” their politician based on how his appearance on television makes them feel. Slogans and symbols become of central importance. This, for Postman, is a direct result of television culture.
What’s more, our relationship with our own history has changed since the rise of television. Because television is a medium of instantaneousness and presence. Americans no longer have a sense of themselves as strongly or causally connected to the past.
Chapter 10
Postman brings up “educational programming” in this section, beginning with the specific example of “Sesame Street.” Sesame Street is education that children love, but it is fundamentally different than school, says Postman. Televisions are not teachers. They cannot be asked questions, and they cannot hold conversations. Postman notes that no education is complete without this social element. If a child can read, write, and count, but cannot converse, question and socialise, then he or she is not properly educated.
People who see television as educational miss the point, says Postman. He contends that all television is educational, but that it educates its viewers in the ideology of television. When children learn from a television, they learn only what a television is capable of teaching them: which is the value of disinformation, entertainment, and amusement.
Chapter 11
“There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first, the Orwellian, culture becomes a prison. In the second — the Huxleyan — culture becomes a burlesque.”
For Orwell, the danger comes from people full of hatred and resentment; for Huxley, the danger comes from people with a smiling, loving face.
So what is to be done? Postman notes that
“Americans will not shut down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest that they do so is to make no suggestion at all.”
Rather, Postman says, the media become less dangerous when they are properly understood. He imagines the remedy to this problem is the education of people regarding the power of the medium of television to shape our national discourse. Once we understand what television does, we can be more proactive about promoting other forms of media (like print). After all, says Postman,
"Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
Themes
Form and Content
At the core of Postman’s argument is a claim about a relationship between the form of a medium (where “form” refers to the form the medium takes, e.g. television, spoken language, writing, etc.) and the content of that medium (where content is the information the medium communicates). Postman says that there is a determinate relationship between form and content. This means that the form of a media determines, or has a definitive impact on, its content.
Certain kinds of media are suited for certain kinds of discourse, information, or communication. For example, Postman argues that television, as a form of media, is simply not suited for rational discussion or any kind of “serious” content.
On the other hand, he believes typography (print and writing) is a form of media perfectly suited for rational content, but not necessarily entertaining content. Spoken language, with its own medium separate from print, also determines its own special content: sayings, proverbs, or aphorisms are the dominant kinds of content in oral traditions, where information is communicated primarily by the spoken word.
Postman believes that this determinate relationship between form and content is of vital importance for people, especially Americans, to understand. He notes that too many Americans believe they can get out of television what they once got out of books or other kinds of print media. The implications for this claim are indeed large: if the form of a medium determines its content, then the introduction and dominance of new media, Postman extrapolates, brings with it the dominance of altogether new kinds of content. The difference between print culture and television culture is not simply the difference between writing and watching: it is the difference between a culture dominated by reason and a culture dominated by entertainment.
Typography vs. Image
The fundamental tension in Postman’s account is the opposition between typography, or print, and the image (as in a photograph or on a television screen). This tension is fundamental to Postman’s argument largely because (he claims) it is this opposition between print and image which is at the heart of the transition occurring in American discourse and culture at the time of his writing in the 1980s.
America, once highly literate and dependent on print-based forms of communication — including, in Postman’s account, books, pamphlets, and public lecture and debate — has now become a culture of the image. Newspapers feature photographs alongside headlines, thus translating news and journalism into an image-centric format. Even more importantly, television has become so central in American culture that it has dominated and overcome print culture.
Postman is often bold about choosing sides in the historical confrontation between print and image. He believes cultures of the image are degraded, less capable of reason, and less politically engaged than cultures of print media. His book then seeks to expose the ways in which television and other image media (like photography) have changed the way Americans understand, behave, believe and even think. For the most part, Postman argues, these new forms of thought, belief, and understanding are inferior to those of the past.
Public Discourse and Media
Much of the book’s argument takes the form of a historical account that tracks the development of public discourse over time. Postman’s historical account is actually quite vast in scope: The Iliad, Plato, Jesus, the Protestant Reformation, and American history from its colonisation to the present are all included in the story Postman tells about the history of media and their effects on culture.
His argument essentially articulates how, in many ways, the history of public discourse is the history of different media forms achieving dominance. The Iliad was the product of an oral culture, while in Plato’s day, the rise of writing was at the center of a cultural shift. The Protestant Reformation was then made possible by the printing press, and in America, there is now a shift occurring between print and image.
Along with providing a lens through which to view the history of public discourse, Postman is also invested in demonstrating that this history, especially in America, is headed in a certain direction. In other words, not all kinds of discourse are created equal. His historical account then asks us to wonder about the damage potentially caused by the legacy of television in American history.
News and Entertainment
A central consideration of Postman’s argument is the role that the news (whether in the newspaper or on television) plays in the development of the 1980s US culture. Postman believes that the news is a particularly insidious force in the transformation of America from a culture of reason into a culture of entertainment.
While the news seems at first glance like an objective dissemination of knowledge and information, Postman maintains that the news actually represents the commodification of knowledge, and the transformation of information into mere entertainment.
The news is information that we always want (and always get, via daily papers and news programmes), but not information that we actually use. It is thus, according to Postman, not really information at all. It is entertainment, and thus a commodity.
The Future
Much of Postman’s text involves working towards a projection of an imagined future. 21st century readers must then ask which parts of Postman’s argument resonate with the present reality, and which parts ring false given advances in technology. These questions are central to the thematic content of the book.
Postman’s text is framed by the disagreement between the work of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell’s novel imagines a world where government repression is responsible for the loss of life, love, and freedom in a hypothetical dystopian future. Brave New World, meanwhile, imagines that people’s desire for shallow entertainment and technology, rather than government repression, will bring about the demise of culture as we know it.
Postman supposes that Huxley’s account of the future will be proven more “right” than Orwell’s. In other words, Postman believes that entertainment will bring down culture before the government does. This gesture acknowledges the fact that texts about the future will eventually be proven “right” or “wrong.” This conclusion must also then apply to Postman’s own text, which, though not a fictional literary dystopia, also makes claims about where we, as a culture, are headed. From the start, then, Postman situates his text as the property of imagined future readers, and he acknowledges that his arguments will eventually be proven “right” or “wrong” when the future actually unfolds.
Years have now passed since the publication of Postman’s investigation of media and technology and their effects on culture. As “future readers,” we are thus in a position to evaluate how “right” or “wrong” Postman’s predictions were. For example, Postman acknowledges the ascendancy of computers, but maintains that everything we know about computers comes from television. Naturally the Internet, though not even in existence at the time of this book’s composition, now hangs over the text in a way that demands our attention as a new kind of media and public discourse. This is indicative of a larger demand placed upon the reader of a text like this: to investigate how it maps onto the present state of media technologies.
Postman’s text interacts with the “future” in ways that Postman could not have foreseen, and this is true of perhaps all works of “Media Theory,” which became popular in the mid-20th century. Nevertheless, contemporary readers of this text must wonder how Postman’s text holds up today, particularly as television remains as ubiquitous as ever, and the Internet has come to form an entirely new kind of public discourse.
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