Chapter 11 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Huxleyan Warning

"Culture becomes a burlesque" in the Huxleyan way of destroying a culture. It does not matter the ideology. Rather than being forced into compliance, we happily walk into it. In many ways, this is more deadly than the Orwellian world, because the faults of it are sometimes invisible. Instead, we must see that technology is far from neutral, inherently biased. We will not go back to  a world without the technology that we have grown so attached to. One librarian hoped that her criticism of television would get media coverage - on television of course. Television is at its worst when it co-opts serious matters (religion, education) and dilutes them for ease of viewing. No matter what, though, television has to be amusing, or else it won't be watched. If television isn't watched, it is nothing. Because of this, reform of these flaws seems nigh impossible, but educators are becoming media-conscious, and Postman says that we simply have to be aware of what it is we are laughing at.

Chapter 10 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Teaching as an Amusing Activity

Sesame Street changed everything about education. This "edutainment" was welcomed with open arms by educators, but it changed how children see education itself. It makes them much more receptive to being taught, but only so long as school is Sesame Street style. Postman doesn't of course, blame Sesame Street itself, but rather the creators of television in general, and Postman also doesn't deny that Sesame Street is educational. Television, Postman says, has created the third great learning crisis in the western world, because it is fundamentally changing the way that we learn and what we learn.

The three commandments of television are as follows:

Thou shalt have no prerequisites.
Thou shalt induce no perplexity.
Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt.

Teachers more and more rely on entertaining their students in order to teach them. The Department of Education endorses the use of television as a learning medium, despite evidence otherwise. Education has to become entertainment, or it becomes irrelevant in this society.

How has the internet changed these "commandments?"
Has modern "edutainment" changed the model that Sesame Street began?
Is Sesame Street's long success related to its endorsement by educators?

Chapter 9 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Reach Out and Elect Someone

It is difficult to compare politics to sports, because in sports everyone knows the rules. Sports are (fairly) transparent, and politics are dirty. Television has only perpetuated this. Commercial advertising has changed the game in an unprecedented way. An average forty-year old, Postman says, will have seen over one million television commercials in that lifetime. We accept the television commercial as a normal form of discourse, so political soundbites are acceptable in these advertisements. In doing this, we simplify things that have to be complicated. We do not trust the complex, so everything must be diluted.

Television does help to show us who is "more capable of negotiation," and who is more knowledgeable, but this is solely through perpetuation of an image. We vote for our own interests. However, Postman says, our interests are largely symbolic. People like Abraham Lincoln could not survive these image politics. Television has no time for history; it is focused solely on the image, and because of that, we are often immediately aware of what is happening, but we do not understand the context.

Orwell was wrong once again. As printed matter fell to the wayside, the government did not need to control print. We have to be entertained constantly.

In what ways can image deceive us?

Would we have elected the same politicians the previous years had image politics not held such great sway over the public?

What are the implications of simplification in regards to art?

Chapter 8 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Shuffle Off to Bethlehem

Televangelists are more and more commonplace, especially since Postman's writing of this book. The preacher is the focus, and the sermons serve as just another form of televised entertainment. This is not the fault of the preachers themselves, but rather the fault of television as a medium and its biases. Religion is something that is truly untelevisable because it loses its purpose when broadcast in this way. The delivery of the message changes the message itself. Television simply doesn't enforce the state of mind that Postman says is necessary for a religious experience because you can watch that sermon the same way we watch any other television show.

There is also the money. These religious programs make as much money as many other non-religious programs. They have the same production value, their preachers are attractive just like any other main character elsewhere on television. By delivering Christianity as something easy to swallow and easy to understand, it undermines the religion itself. God plays a second role to the entertainment value of the program. God is in our minds, whereas the preacher is immediately available to be idolized.

If it is entertaining, does that mean that religion isn't working?
Is this simply an example of moving into the modern age, or what are the even higher implications?
Does the same hold true for other religions, or has only Christianity been commercialized this way?

Chapter 7 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: "Now... This"

Now... this is the title of Chapter 7. The Now, This mentality leads to fragmented news with no context. News shows choose attractive people to tell their audiences terrible things, and this leads to not looking for people with credentials, but people with nice faces, ones that are "likable and credible." They frame the program with music at the beginning and end to set a mood, to help dissociate viewers from the seriousness of whatever the news is. Television news is not constructed to make the viewer think of the implication of the news.

In some ways, Postman argues, television is anticommunication. Television that is informative has only a niche audience, and follows typographic discourse. Because of this, Postman says, Americans are easily the best-entertained and least-well-informed people on the planet. This leads us to a Huxley-esque Brave New World style universe, where we want gratification more than anything else and it's readily available.

How does "now... this" culture perpetuate mean world syndrome?
Are there any ways that the world is like 1984?
Has the media further desensitized us from the time Postman wrote his book?

Chapter 4 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Typographic Mind

Orators color American history, and none more so, perhaps, than Abraham Lincoln. He is most well known (in orating) for his debates with Stephen Douglas. Even these events, though, were beacons of entertainment. Postman writes that these debates took on the air of carnivals, surrounded by rides and fun. These audiences were not more intellectually able than audiences of today, just in tune with a different kind of entertainment. Even this speech is an extension of the written word, and the people were in tune with it because they were entertained by the written word.

Print gave way to analytical thought in a way never before seen. Logic and reason were important in a way that they never had been before. It was a time, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that religion was being scrutinized in a way that it never had been before. These churches did, though, lay the foundation for the modern university structure. Typography began to decline in the 1860s, documented by Frank Presbey. Postman calls this entire age the Age of Exposition.

Are we still in the Age of Show Business?
How did the importance of rational thought shape our reliance on the written word?

Chapter 3 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Typographic America

Chapter 3 begins with Postman relating the story of the Dunkers. The Dunkers, a minor religious sect in the United States, are the singular instance of a religious sect refusing to write down their principles, because their principles should be able to change over time. Writing down religious doctrines would bind the Dunkers in a way that would leave them "entrapped" for all time. The colonists in the New World were intensely preoccupied with their own literacy, most coming from very literate parts of England. More than that though, education was of God, keeping Satan at bay. Additionally, Americans didn't have to create their own literary tradition from scratch. They had a whole library to import from the motherland. Everyone, rich and poor, had access to reading, and so read everyone did. In this society, Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold better than any book today possibly could; only an event like the Super Bowl could attract such numbers.The printing press received quicker success in America than home in England, as the British royalty did not try to stop it as it did in its own cities of Liverpool and Birmingham.

Americans did quickly establish their own tradition no matter their history. The newspaper, Postman says, greatly changed the typographic game. Benjamin Harris published the first in Boston in 1690. The Boston News-Letter, Boston Gazette, and New England Courant followed in the thirty years after. Proportionally speaking, Americans had far more newspapers per head than England did. Pamphlets and newspapers quickly replaced books as the primary outlet for Americans to read. By the 1800s, America was an incredibly print-based culture. Charles Dickens was treated as a celebrity upon his arrival there in 1842. Lecture halls reinforced this culture, with writers frequenting the Lyceum circuit. The printed word dominated American culture totally.

Were pamphlets the soundbites of colonial times?
Did Americans pay such attention to the printed word just to spite the Old World?
In what ways did the Lyceum movement influence more modern academic lectures?

Chapter 6 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Age of Show Business

Postman begins by positing that television is not just a mere extension of print. He says that it is closer to an extension of the telegraph and photography instead of the printing press, and then asks, "What is television?" The answer, he says, is that it is technology with an agenda. In this way, the printing press and television are similar. They have bias in how they are generally used. Television is used to convey great entertainment, and it is thus exported around the world. Television could be used to be a bright spot in a difficult life; however, it has become much more than that.

The language is fragmented and reduced to what we could now call soundbites, making it difficult to receive satisfactory knowledge from television. There are some programs which attempt to achieve this sort of intellectual discourse, but they are few and far between. Television is so influential because it is more than movies and the radio and music; it encompasses all discourse.

For what reason did television develop the bias that it has?

Why has American television been so popular when the same can not be said for television of other cultures?

Could television have been a more "intellectual" medium if given the chance?

Has it become more or less intellectual since the time of Postman's writing?

Chapter 5 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Peek-a-Boo World

Postman begins by showing the way that the telegraph totally changed the way discourse occurred in the United States, changing how (and what) information was important. It made information a necessary commodity. Postman quotes Coleridge to show how people were inundated with information, most of it with very little use. The telegraph, he argues, paved the way for news as slogans, almost soundbites. Telegraph information was like headlines, but it stopped there-impersonal, fragmented, and sensational. The telegraph desensitized the average person to what was going on around them. Postman also makes sure to distinguish the photograph from language, and what this meant for communication as the photograph became part of the mainstream.

All of this useless knowledge, he writes, gave rise to trivia games such as the crossword puzzle as people searched for ways to use their "useless" knowledge, and as the electronic conversation kept on, and photography and the telegraph were major contributors to pushing typographic culture out of relevance. Similarly, the radio also came to support this epistemological shift, as did film, and all this together created what Postman calls "the peek-a-boo world." The peek-a-boo world is one where information blinks in and out, endlessly entertaining but without much of a point. This wouldn't be a problem but for the fact that it is all we have. We no longer have a culture and entertainment. Our entertainment (specifically television) has become our culture.

Would we argue that television is no longer our culture, but that the internet is?

Can photography be considered an art of truth in the advent of photo-editing technology?

Postman seems to be arguing that the so-called shrinking of the world by telegraph was a negative thing for the state of information. Was it the same for everything else?

Chapter 2 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Media as Epistemology

In chapter two, Postman makes his purpose even clearer. He wants to prove how television has made our media into nonsense. Postman immediately goes on, however, to say that the best part of television is its nonsense; the problem is that people want to take television seriously, and for television's output to be significant. Probably one of the most important parts of this reading, in my opinion, was the definition of epistemology (a subject concerned with the origins and nature of knowledge). Through resonance, Postman claims, media gains a power much greater than it originally may have. This is only transcended in subcultures (university settings, courtrooms, etc.) where the written word is given higher precedence than the spoken.

Through a phrase called "print-intelligence," Postman makes the case that we are growing sillier and sillier by moving from print-based epistemology to television-based epistemology. We must be able to distinguish tone as well as be able to see through it, Postman says, as well as a number of other things, in order to be not ruined by television, as it "pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape (page 28)."

What is the truth of this today, with our internet-based epistemology?

Why are certain environments (courtrooms, universities) slower to change than the rest?

What sort of things are "resonant" today?

A Juxtaposition of Commercials

I loved the esurance Walter White commercial during the Super Bowl. It had everything I look for in an advertisement. It was easy to laugh at as well as short and to the point, and the pop culture references made it all the more enjoyable. The ads in general were very enjoyable this year for the most part, and helped make the experience of a great game even better.

Besides this commercial, my favorite one by far was the domestic violence PSA. It was absolutely chilling, with the calm 911 call over images of domestic unrest, and I know that a lot of people really didn't like it because it made them upset. However, these people miss the point. The advertisement was supposed to make us uncomfortable, and it absolutely achieved its purpose. So many people say it was too glum, but they fail to see the reality that people who are victims of domestic violence live with. In my opinion, this was the most powerful advertisement of the Super Bowl. It was meant to make us upset about something that happens behind closed doors every day.

Chapter 1 of Amusing Ourselves to Death: The Medium is the Metaphor

Postman begins his book with examples of several successful people who have their skill as entertainers to thank (at least somewhat) for their success in other fields. People like Ronald Reagan were certainly helped by their status as figures in the media, and Postman points out that it's almost inconceivable that William Howard Taft could be president today with his immense stature. Richard Nixon told Ted Kennedy that the only way he would even be able to make a viable run for President would be to lose several pounds.

The "news of the day" being invented by the telegraph was interesting to me, especially because I had always assumed that it was a product of the radio and newspaper. After saying this, Postman makes clear the purpose of the book; it is to reflect on the shift from the "Age of Typography" to the "Age of Television" in the latter half of the twentieth century. The only constant, Postman says, is speech. Most importantly, though, is how Postman says that we interpret the world through metaphor. Because of this, we can make things we don't understand more easily understood, and I think this is one of the most interesting things in the first chapter. It's amazing how this affects our understanding of the world around us.

1. If the only constant in communication is speech, how is that affecting us now that texting and the internet play such a major part in everyday life?

2. If Las Vegas embodied the spirit of America when this book was published, what would that city be today?