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    Amusing Ourselves to Death
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    Amusing Ourselves to Death
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    Amusing Ourselves to Death
    Audiobook4 hours

    Amusing Ourselves to Death

    Written by Neil Postman

    Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how “entertainment values” have corrupted the very way we think. As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television. And because television is a visual medium whose images are most pleasurably apprehended when they are fast-moving and dynamic, discourse on television has little tolerance for argument, hypothesis, or explanation. Postman argues that public discourse—the advancing of arguments in logical order for the public good, once a hallmark of American culture—is being converted from exposition and explanation to entertainment.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlackstone Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2007
    ISBN9780786104604
    Unavailable
    Amusing Ourselves to Death

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    Reviews for Amusing Ourselves to Death

    4/5

    766 ratings34 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A scathing indictment of American culture.
    • 5/5
      Good book. Criticisms by author aimed at what TV is doing to our culture, but very applicable to the Web world.
    • 2/5
      Even if it was visionary 30 years ago it doesn't mean it's still relevant. It isn't.
    • 4/5
      Although the world Postman writes about is a little dated, the book is still very thought provoking. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in media's effect (and especially television) on society.
    • 5/5
      Don't bother waiting for this book to be made into a TV movie. Get of your ass and read, you lazy, self-absorbed slug. Postman hits our cultural, educational and social malaise over the head. He's a brilliant social and educational critic.
    • 5/5
      Don't bother waiting for this book to be made into a TV movie. Get of your ass and read, you lazy, self-absorbed slug. Postman hits our cultural, educational and social malaise over the head. He's a brilliant social and educational critic.
    • 5/5
      I have often heard about this book and now have finally read (listened to) it. It is still relevant and I enjoyed it a lot.
    • 4/5
      Good book on the lack of seriousness in America.
    • 5/5
      I was a little surprised at how much I enjoyed this book.

      Originally published in 1985, the author gives a deep dive into how TV has changed and shaped modern education, political campaigns, news and religion. He gives a very understandable argument that the overall effect of TV as a medium has been negative. Information provided in a largely visual format, mood controlled by music, information delivered only by telegenic good-looking people has influenced every aspect of our lives.

      And this was long before 24-7 cable news, social media and twitter. Not to mention how we are now all glued to our smart phones. I looked to see if he had written a more recent book with these 21st century inventions, but sadly he passed away in 2003. I would love to see if someone has picked up and continued his work. I think he would have a field day with smart phones!
    • 4/5
      A densely packed and highly relevant book about the effect visual media is having on the way we think, learn and interact with our world. The author make a compelling and chilling argument that television and it's technological children are at war with the written word. For centuries, writing has been the medium by which humanity has organized its thoughts and communication. But with the rise of television, knowledge has become inextricably linked with entertainment and the attention span of the average American has shrunk. Knowledge has been reduced to a series of unconnected facts that are robbed of all meaning and shortly forgotten.Though a bit dated in places, this book is prescient in others and seems overwhelmingly relevant in this election year. We are seriously doomed.
    • 5/5
      Written in the mid 80's 'Amusing Our Selves to Death' remains a damning indictment of what a runaway entertainment mindset has done to American culture. Things are not better, if anything, things are worse. Celebrity culture has taken over the web and the websites of most major newspapers. What to do? Kill your TV. There are tools now so that you can pick and choose what you want to see. Also limit your time online. Read, listen to music, go to a concert, get outside, Join a book club. Don't let Hollywood rent space in your head.
    • 5/5
      Postman does a fantastic job detailing the dangers of visual media on discourse. Amusing Ourselves to Death is frightening & enlightening, I highly recommend this book, it was an easy read with a lot of depth.
    • 5/5
      I intended to---and still might---write a really meaty review, but I'm finding I need to mull over the ideas in this book a bit more. The short version is: I love Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman's hypothesis is that in predicting how the population would be controlled, Huxley, not Orwell, had it right. Our minds aren't being controlled by force by a totalitarian regime but by our own insatiable desire to be entertained. Postman's observations are even more relevant today than they were in the mid-1980's when he wrote the book, and I found his curmudgeonly tone endearing, even when he was attacking "Sesame Street." (I have no difficulty agreeing with everything he says about "Sesame Street" while still retaining my love for Grover.)Here are some of my favorite quotes. Actually, I guess it's the ideas behind the quotes that are my favorites.That's what's tough about substantive books: complex arguments are difficult to sound-bite-ify. None of these quotes would make a pithy meme, but here are the quotes that represent ideas that really spoke to me:p.11: "...beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers...with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events."p. 128: "[Television commercials] tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer." (And this was before DTC pharmaceutical ads.)p. 130: "The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry...a person who has seen one million television commercials [the average a person has seen by the age of forty] might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures---or ought to." (This one really hit home with the way the current presidential campaign is going.)p. 139: "The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America."p. 141: "How delighted would be all the kings, czars and f?hrers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest."p. 142: "Parents embraced 'Sesame Street' for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children's access to television. 'Sesame Street' appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of time. Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most crackle. At the same time, 'Sesame Street' relieved them of the responsibility of teaching their pre-school children how to read---no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be considered a nuisance." (Replace "Sesame Street" with "educational apps" and "television" with "tablet" or "smartphone" and you've updated the argument for the twenty-first century.)p. 161: "Thus, a central thesis of computer technology---that 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."The antidote, Postman suggests, is not to reject new technologies but instead to question them rather than blindly adopting them. I wonder, is this really enough? Whether it is or not is likely irrelevant. We turn to the Internet---especially social media---for so much information, connection, and emotional comfort these days, I fear we're not much inclined to question the source.
    • 5/5


      It's amazing how well this book has stood the test of time. We are still amusing ourselves to death, though now we have a new medium, the Internet. Our world is even more fragmented, more information overload, but the Internet restores typography to an extent, in bite size chunks. I wonder what Postman would had thought of Twitter.
    • 4/5
      Very prescient. Very scary. I've been saying all along that we live in a dystopian society in this country, and Postman's book gives me more proof. Fantastic read.
    • 4/5
      Postman is right to point out that every non-natural tool of humankind, from the most sophisticated computer or medical imaging device to the alphabet and a hammer, is a piece of technology. It is rather moving to contemplate that there was a time when every non-natural thing we take for granted in our world, from simple pottery to the wheel was at one time the state-of-the-art. Postman warns us that all technologies are potentially harmful- the major specter brought by our cumulative increase in technological sophistication is an exponential increase in our capacity for destructiveness. Postman rightly posited that all technological change is "ecological, not additive": in Postman’s example of (and fascination with) television, the advent of the boob tube did not equal America plus television, it rendered an entirely different culture that buried our previous one. It could be said with only some degree of abstraction that the wars that devastated Europe in the first half of the twentieth century were violent reactions fostered by a neurotic compulsion to deny the observations of individuals like Freud, but with different tactics. World War I was a war whose ideology was extremely old-fashioned and antiquated, and entirely untenable given the major advancements in knowledge being made with little or no awareness of the monarchies. Ironically, this war was fought with the most advanced weaponry to that time, albeit largely contained within humble trenches that magnified the destructiveness. Cultures that had failed to maturely adapt to the technological changes had gleaming tanks, massive howitzers, airplanes and machine guns utilized within a most primitive framework. Then, the next world war pushed the technology envelope far further, and couched it within fascism and national socialism, cousin ideologies that schizophrenically billed themselves as ultra-modern even as they peddled an intense nostalgia for an idealized past that never existed. The toxic combination of high technology and moribund, reactionary culture leads to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. What astonishes me is to contemplate how World War II narrowly delayed epoch-making technologies that were on tap, but shunted aside for war production. Can you imagine Hitler on television, or the death camps run by sophisticated bureaucrats with IBM mainframes and electronically-controlled railroad switching? Richard Nixon, generally regarded as an utterly uncompelling black hole of charisma, won a place in the hearts of middle America during the 1952 campaign when he came into their living room and earnestly talked about his daughters’ cocker spaniel. How much more thoroughly could Hitler have manipulated his countrymen and the world with such technological capability at his fingertips? (Or would his style have been too hot for a cool medium like television?) Conversely, what if the internet, video games, and 500-channel cable television had been mainstream in the early 1970s? Would the country have been as fixated on Watergate had their ability to tune in and drop out been comparable to ours in the present day? I believe that such exercises in counterfactual history can be more than parlor games if one considers how our world as it is now would be construed if we were not endowed with such technological advances.Postman was an extremely thought-provoking media theorist.
    • 4/5
      I have been recently reading to quite a few articles and listening to several programs on how our modern forms of media are subtly rewiring our brains to be less thoughtful and less able to maintain an attention span longer than the length of the average image on television; that is to say, not very long. This is something that a lot of us are seeing today and wondering what to do about it. Neil Postman saw it back in 1984, and his warning should be heeded still. Because of discussions on this topic, this book was loaned to me, and I am thankful for it.Our instinct is to turn to more intelligent programs rather than watching the fluff on television. But Postman's concern is not the content of what we are watching, but the form. It is not that the History Channel has very many interesting and educational programs. It is that even the History Channel's way of presenting them is doing more harm than good.Contrary to what we've been taught, the medium used itself carries something with it. Television in particular has come at a high cost by the very fact that it because our source for all information for some time. Postman might write about the smart phone today, if he were alive. The situation was become more dire, since it is no longer a very heavy box in our living room that is controlling the flow of information, but a very light box in our pockets. No longer is work or the restaurant a break from media, but we are very willing to read a text at the table.The solution here is awareness. It is rather difficult to survive in business anymore without at least a computer, if not a smart phone. These are not things we can do without anymore. But being aware of what is happening to us may change the way we approach things. Our business typically want us to be multi-taskers, jumping from project to project. This book, as well as those other articles I've been reading, have convinced me that maybe it would be very good for my brain to sit down with a book in the evening and read for a while.
    • 5/5
      "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is one of the most thought provoking books on the media I have ever read. It has caused me to look at television through a different set of eyes. The point is well made in this book that television has done much to reduce some of the most important aspects of American life to the lowest common denominator. The author, Neil Postman asserts that television is actually at its worst when it seeks to be a substitute for more traditional forms of education, religion, and information. He argues that the age of electronic media has created an environment where we are now inundated with too much information and that much of it is irrelevant to our daily lives. This book left me pondering the time I spend with television and its impact on how I view the world. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a small book with large implications.
    • 4/5
      Most provocative ideas: information that is not relevant to your life is just trivia and most of what we get. Television emphasizes simple images. A lack of abstraction comes from a lack of literary involvement. Need to figure out how this plays out with the internet.
    • 5/5
      Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show BusinessNeil PostmanThis was a book about how subtle and overtly the way we communicate and correspond have been altered. That we are quickly dumb down ourselves. That when there were debates during the times of the civil war people left their jobs after 12 hours of work to go to a hall and listen to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. They went on for hours with a break for dinner and then all reassembled to continue. No one today would do this nor would many understand the discussion. TV has changed the speed of conversations. It was truly an eye opening book. It was a refreshing quick read that was informative, and an education. I would recommend this to others as it was recommended to me. I use the Lincoln-Douglas debates to educate others about this change in our society and culture.
    • 4/5
      Is there a relationship between the decline in education in the United States today and the ever present media entertainment. Cell phones and texting are only making this worse.
    • 4/5
      An important and valuable read, Postman's book was published in 1985, before the explosion of the internet. It's ideas, however, are still very relevant today.Postman argues, very articulately, that television has seriously altered our culture and, in fact, poses a serious threat to it. One might think he'd play the role of curmudgeon and point to all the "garbage" on television, but instead, he argues that tv is most dangerous "when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations". Informative, thought-provoking, and yes, even entertaining, this is definitely a recommended read.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant and visionary. Everyone should read this.
    • 5/5
      Neil Postman has put forth the idea that television has usurped the role of print as the dominant medium/metaphor of our culture. This change has had profound consequences in almost every aspect of our lives with the result that we are unable to be a serious people.For centuries, the people of western civilization were accustomed to communicate through print. Print brings its own metaphor and its own structure to those who use it. In fact, the influence of print was so pervasive that our society learned to think, reason, and speak in the language of print. This was a positive development since print produces thoughtful reflection in almost every area of life. Unfortunately, print was usurped by television. Because of this, our society has learned a new metaphor that shapes our discussion. It is not just that we use television to communicate but that we are unable to comprehend ideas unless they are presented in the format of television. This has had disastrous consequences since this medium is unfit for serious discussion. As Huxley predicted, everything for us is now entertainment, and we have been lulled to sleep in our amusements. News, religion, politics, and education have succumbed to this powerful force and are now simply different forms of play. The solution is to be aware of the effect of television which unfortunately would require the analytical skills that have now been lost.Postman argues his case well. Experience confirms the wisdom of his point. Television is our primary language with devastating results that we can only now begin to understand.
    • 4/5
      Postman describes television as an ideology that has negatively altered the way Americans communicate by shifting our culture from a literate, thoughtful and well-read people to one that passively absorbs information from non-contextual imagery and sound bites. He likens television to the devastating "soma" in Huxley's Brave New World and much closer to reality than Orwell's dark predictions. Fascinating read. You will never look at television news the same way.
    • 3/5
      Sometimes insightful, sometimes frustrating. Nobody gets it all right, but Postman does seem to have a rather idyllic view of early American life, into which slavery never seems to factor. Interesting.But, as someone who is not a fan of televised news, I nodded a bit in the politics chapter.
    • 5/5
      Starting by reading the introduction, I thought that will be again one of those prophetic books about media and television flying over the top and forgetting about the inner problem of visual media usage. Not at all, the book is incredible and really dig into the issue of our society moving "away" from typography for going into visual and short-term visual events. The book is well structured and covering very well the aspects of short-term visual communication. The text written in 1985 is still very valuable and even provides an insightful perspective to our Today's society of entertainment (as somehow defined by Aldous Huxley or by Guy Debord). An interesting reading opening the doors to interesting discussions about media and our society.
    • 5/5
      Profound book. Although shrill in parts, it echoes a lot of ideas that I've been mulling over. My copy is now heavily commented and highlighted.
    • 4/5
      This book is a phenomenal treatise on society's inundation with mass media, especially television, and it's increasing unawareness of the damaging affects of media on public discourse.
    • 4/5
      This book is sort of minor classic about how visual media (particularly TV) inherently differ from literary media. Worth the read for the explanation of how even educational TV offers much less content and critical analysis than a book on the same subject, and for the explanation of commercials as parables.