Thirty-five years ago, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman warned that television was reshaping our culture and trivializing public life—including news, politics, religion, education, and business—by turning it into entertainment.
His concern was television’s ability to so inundate us with irrelevant information that we’d lose sight of what was important and meaningful—even worse, we wouldn’t care as long as we felt entertained.
Postman’s central message resonates today because television has been joined by a host of even more distracting media. Devices like smartphones and tablets, plus numerous methods of communication, including email, texting, the internet, cable, gaming, and streaming, continue to enlarge the culture of entertainment he saw taking shape.
When this book was published, the year 1984 had just passed and Americans were relieved that the totalitarian scenario depicted by George Orwell in the novel 1984 hadn’t materialized. However, Postman argued that Americans were instead moving toward the different dystopian scenario of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where entertainment technology rather than democracy became the ideology.
The rise of television as our dominant medium or means of communication in the second half of the 20th century redefined American culture.
Throughout human history, the form or technology of communication has dictated what ideas we express and how we express them. In replacing the Age of Typography or print, the Age of Television changed the content of our public discourse by redefining every aspect of public life, from politics to religion, as entertainment or show business.
We’re in essence “amusing ourselves to death”—that is, hastening the death of our culture by accommodating ourselves to television’s way of defining things, without thinking about or even noticing what’s happening.
Television is just the latest example of how our forms of communication throughout history have dictated what is communicated and, therefore, shaped our culture.
For example, native Americans communicated with smoke signals, but the form—puffs of smoke—precluded complicated messages like a discussion of philosophy.
The telegraph was another medium whose form or design determined the information it delivered. The telegraph made it possible to move bits of disparate information lacking any context over long distances at incredible speed. Previously inaccessible information about fires, wars, and murders in far-flung places became part of local conversations and culture despite lacking local relevance.
Today, we’ve adapted to receiving news and information in a fragmented form because television and other electronic media are designed to deliver it this way.
To understand just how much television has changed the way we think and talk, it’s necessary to contrast today’s shallow entertainment culture with the serious, rational print culture that shaped America from the colonists’ arrival in the New World through the 19th century.
In that era, print structured public discourse, influenced its content, and appealed to and required a certain kind of audience—one skilled at reading and logical thinking.
The colonists were avid readers, particularly of the Bible, and they brought many books with them from England and had others imported. The literacy rate for all social classes was high.
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, had an immense audience, selling about 400,000 copies. The equivalent in 1985 would be a book selling 24 million copies.
In terms of capturing public attention, Paine’s feat would be comparable to the Super Bowl today.
Attending debates on the issues of the day was an important part of civic and social life. County and state fairs offered lineups of speakers in three-hour slots with equal time for opponents. “Stump” speaking, in which speakers held forth while standing on a tree stump, was also popular in the West.
Speakers used the style of the written word with long, complex sentences, as well as rhetorical devices such as sarcasm, irony, and metaphors, knowing that their audiences would be able to keep up. They could also rely on their listeners’ familiarity with history and current events. Audiences had remarkable attention spans.
You could call this period in America the Age of Exposition, characterized by a way of thinking, learning, and expression. Print culture required and enhanced the characteristics necessary for mature conversation or discourse—for instance, thinking rationally, coherently, and objectively.
But by the end of the 19th century, the Age of Exposition began giving way to the Age of Entertainment.
Two technological developments changed public discourse: the invention of the telegraph, which removed the constraints on communication of speed and distance; and the development of photography, which replaced words with images.
The telegraph, and the newspapers that relied on it for information-gathering, decontextualized information and turned it into a commodity. It didn’t need to have a value to the recipient or serve any local purpose other than stirring interest or curiosity.
In oral and print-based cultures, information’s importance depended on its utility or the possibility it presented for action. You could do something with it to affect your life or community. However, the telegraph and subsequent technologies have disconnected information from action. We have an information glut and, at the same time, a diminished sense of agency or control—after all, we can’t do anything about a war halfway around the world.
Besides eliminating relevance and value, the telegraph undermined public discourse by making it incoherent. Print culture’s strength is the exposition and analysis of information. The telegraph’s strength was simply moving information fast. Messages were quickly replaced by new messages with no connection to what came before or after.
Intelligence no longer meant understanding context or implications. It simply meant knowing a lot of disparate, fleeting things in the form of sensational headlines. The telegraph created a disorderly, disconnected conversation of strangers.
Adding to the telegraph’s assault on print culture and coherence was the development of photography in the1840s and ‘50s. Like the telegraph, photos eliminated context. A photograph represents only an instant; it presents the world as disconnected moments or events. Photos can’t present ideas, only isolated objects.
Images have been around since the days of cave paintings, and they coexisted with words until photography launched an all-out war on language. Imagery—which quickly permeated American culture as photos, illustrations, posters, and advertisements—began to displace print in shaping our understanding of the world.
Print culture viewed the world as ordered, rational, understandable, and requiring citizen engagement. In contrast, the burgeoning image-driven culture later dominated by television viewed the world as chaotic, disconnected, distracting, and disempowering.
The image helped redefine information and news as having no continuity or importance apart from entertainment. “News” magazines such as Life and Look showcased dramatic or glamorous photographs lacking newsworthiness. Newspapers and advertisers learned that attention-grabbing images had a greater impact than explanatory writing. Seeing became more persuasive than reading and thinking.
Photography and the telegraph in partnership reshaped the news. Photos gave concreteness to faraway datelines. A photo, news story, and headline together created a feeling of context, but without any past or sense of continuity. It was a “pseudo-context,” created for information of no value beyond entertainment.
The electronic media that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—television, film, and radio—accelerated the trends begun by the telegraph and photography. They created a disjointed, senseless world, where events constantly pop up and disappear from our view.
By providing a constant stream of compelling images unrelated to our lives, television culture has turned us from engaged citizens to a passive audience waiting to be entertained. Television tells us reality or life isn’t rational, so it must be entertaining.
Entertainment, in itself, isn’t a problem. It’s that television and its metaphor of reality as entertainment have taken over our homes, as well as reshaping every aspect of public life and how we understand it. We’ve come to judge everything by its entertainment value. For instance:
When a nation defines its culture as non-stop entertainment, it’s at risk of cultural disintegration. In America, Huxley’s predictions are coming to fruition. With our full embrace of television, we’ve unconsciously undertaken an experiment in completely giving ourselves over to the distractions of technology.
An Orwellian threat would be more obvious—we know what authoritarianism looks like. But we’ve failed to recognize entertainment technology as our ideology. Like an ideology, television imposes a system of ideas and ideals, a way of life. It’s launched a cultural revolution in America without discussion, a vote, or resistance.
So how do we save ourselves from a Huxleyan fate?
The problem isn’t what we watch, it’s how. Since television is most dangerous when we’re oblivious to what it’s doing, the solution is to see and question what we’re seeing. By asking questions, we demystify and break television’s or technology’s spell over us.
For instance:
Only by seeing and understanding what it’s doing can we hope to gain control over television or any other technology. The problem in Huxley’s Brave New World wasn’t that people were happy and laughing without thinking. It was that they’d forgotten what they were laughing about and why they’d stopped thinking.
Thirty-five years ago, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman warned that television was reshaping our culture and trivializing public life—our news, politics, religion, education, and business—by turning everything into entertainment.
His concern was television’s ability to so inundate us with irrelevant information that we’d lose sight of what was important and meaningful—even worse, we wouldn’t care as long as we felt entertained.
Postman’s central message resonates today because television has been joined by a host of even more distracting media. Devices like smartphones and tablets, plus numerous methods of communication, including email, texting, the internet, cable, gaming, and streaming, continue to enlarge the culture of entertainment he saw taking shape.
In the introduction to the 2005 edition of the book, Neil Postman’s son Andrew argues that reading the book today is like turning on a light switch—we’re shocked at the brightness or clarity, having not realized it had gotten so dark.
Between 1985 and 2005, our average time spent watching TV remained steady at about four and a half hours a day. (Shortform note: On top of that, we’ve since added at least three more hours a day of entertainment-based screen time viewing other kinds of screens.)
Postman warns that while transformative media technology dazzles and “amuses” us, it also powerfully influences us by dictating what we know and think and how we respond. We need to pay attention to and question what it’s doing to us—for instance, by asking:
Postman doesn’t offer many solutions—he mostly leaves those up to future readers. He intends his book to be a wake-up call to first see what technology, particularly television, is doing to public life and discourse and how it’s doing it. That, in itself, was a radical proposition in 1985 and remains so today.
In 1985, when this book was first published, the Cold War with the Soviet Union was still on and an actor-turned-politician, Ronald Reagan, was president. The Mac computer was a year old and USA Today was three. Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings were anchoring nightly newscasts, and the top-rated TV shows were Dallas, Cheers, and Dynasty.
As the year 1984 came and went, Americans were relieved that the totalitarian scenario depicted by George Orwell in the novel 1984 didn’t materialize. However, Postman argued that Americans were instead moving toward the different dystopian scenario of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Differences between the two writers’ visions included:
This book argues that Huxley’s version of the future—a population interested only in being satisfied and entertained—is the one we are moving toward. Part 1 looks at how media define information, truth, and public discourse, while Part 2 looks at how television has redefined those things by creating a culture of entertainment.
Throughout human history, the form or technology of communication has dictated what ideas we express and how we express them.
In early America, print culture defined the world as ordered, rational, understandable, and requiring citizen engagement. In contrast, beginning in the late 19th century, the burgeoning image-driven culture later dominated by television presented the world as chaotic, disconnected, distracting, and disempowering. As a result, we became fixated on whatever was most entertaining, rather than most valuable or important.
In replacing the Age of Typography or print, the Age of Television changed the content of our public discourse (what we talk about) by redefining every aspect of public life—politics, news, education, religion, and business—as entertainment or show business.
We’re in essence “amusing ourselves to death”—that is, hastening the death of our culture by accommodating ourselves to television’s way of defining things, without thinking about or even noticing what’s happening.
At various points in American history, different cities have embodied the spirit of the time. In the late 18th century, Boston and its surroundings nurtured political radicalism and the American revolution. In the mid-19th century, New York was the melting pot, and in the early 20th century, Chicago represented industrial might.
More recently, Las Vegas and show business have come to define the spirit of a time where public discourse, shaped by television, has taken the form of entertainment. Politics is an example. Pre-television, politicians were known for their words. But as television evolved in the 1960s, image and putting on a show became more important than what people said. Politicians had to be attractive and fit, or at least not fat—it’s doubtful our 27th president, the 300-pound Howard Taft, could have been elected in the television era.
At the time this book was written, the U.S. president was a former movie actor, Ronald Reagan, who had observed years earlier that “Politics is just like show business.” Seeing the power of television to draw an audience, politicians began popping up in small roles on popular television shows.
Former President Richard Nixon, who believed he’d lost an election earlier in his career because of a poor make-up job, learned his lesson and years later advised Sen. Edward Kennedy to lose weight if he wanted to be a serious presidential contender.
Television journalists spent as much time as candidates on enhancing their looks for the camera. In fact, appearance or “camera appeal” was a requirement for delivering the news. Everyone, from advertisers to celebrity preachers like Billy Graham to sex expert Dr. Ruth understood the requirement of television to look good and be entertaining and uncomplicated in order to command an audience.
Politicians of the 20th century quickly learned that the medium or form of communication dictates the message, and they accommodated themselves to television. In fact, our forms of communication throughout history have similarly dictated what was communicated and shaped the culture. Television is just the latest example.
For example, native Americans communicated with smoke signals, but the form—puffs of smoke—precluded complicated messages like a discussion of philosophy. (You can’t convey philosophy on television, either—its form of communicating in images rather than words requires more simplistic content.)
The telegraph was another medium whose form or design determined the information it delivered. The kind of information that Americans have come to think of as the “news of the day” didn’t exist until the telegraph was invented and delivered it.
The telegraph made it possible to move bits of disparate information lacking any context over long distances at incredible speed. Previously inaccessible information about fires, wars, and murders in far-flung places became part of local conversations and culture despite lacking local relevance. (Chapter 5 examines the rise of the telegraph in more detail.)
Today, we’ve adapted to receiving the “news of the day” in a fragmented form because television and other electronic media are designed to deliver it this way. Cultures that delivered information over long distances by smoke signals didn’t have “news of the day.”
Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan originated the idea that the dominant medium available to a culture largely determines its public discourse. He observed that every new medium—painting, hieroglyphs, the alphabet, the printing press, telegraph, and television—recreated discourse by changing people’s way of thinking. For instance, the development of the alphabet and writing shifted the mode of perceiving language from hearing to reading.
McLuhan argued that “the medium is the message”—that form (like smoke signals) dictates content. However, media forms are even more powerful than McLuhan realized. It’s more appropriate to say “the medium is the metaphor.” The dominant medium becomes a society’s metaphor for reality. As we’ll see, the medium—in our case, television—tells us we should view the world as disjointed entertainment. Yet we’re largely unaware of television’s role in defining our reality.
Every tool or technology we create changes our thinking in some way beyond the tool’s actual function. When the clock enabled us to measure time moment by moment, time became fathomable rather than a mysterious force controlled by God or nature. Similarly, the invention of eyeglasses suggested that the human body could be improved and the effects of aging countered.
The shift from typography/writing to television as the dominant medium of our era is transforming our way of thinking and the content of our culture by elevating entertainment as the goal.
As communication in America has shifted from print to television, public discourse has degenerated into nonsense. In the print era, conversation was serious and rational; under the sway of television, it’s become shallow and incoherent.
The problem isn’t that television produces garbage—print has produced its share of nonsense as well. Nonsense can be enjoyable. In fact, the best shows on television are the “junk” shows, according to Postman. But television becomes a problem when it purports to be serious and aspires to conduct a meaningful cultural conversation—for what it defines as serious and presents as truth actually drowns out truth with trivial nonsense.
Throughout history, the form of a culture’s media has influenced that culture’s conception of the truth (its epistemology). Following are several examples of how the type of media influenced what people believed to be true.
In oral cultures, judges would decide disputes by searching their mental store of proverbs for one that seemed to fit the situation. The medium (the proverb) defined the truth and the parties accepted it as presenting a just solution. Similarly, Jesus drew on parables and sayings as a means of developing and illustrating truths.
Today, we might use sayings and parables to teach lessons to children—for instance, first come, first served; the early bird gets the worm; haste makes waste. But our laws and legal culture are print-based. Lawyers and judges determine the truth by parsing written laws and legal opinions. They need to be well-schooled rather than wise. (Paradoxically, jurors are instructed to rely on what they see and hear in the courtroom rather than the written word).
In academia, scholars consider published (written) words to have greater authenticity or truth than spoken words. They give credibility to published words rendered in a concrete form, which have presumably been thought through, revised, and vetted by other scholars and editors. The written word is verifiable, refutable, and objective.
In contrast, people’s verbal remarks are seen as more casual and fleeting. Because written words are more durable, they seem more credible, accurate, and truthful.
At his trial, Socrates lost credibility (and his life) because he failed to communicate in the way a majority of his jurors defined as truthful. Socrates spoke extemporaneously and asked jurors for patience with his lack of preparation. But this contradicted the prevailing belief that polished rhetoric or oratory was an indication of truthfulness. Today, in contrast, we often think of rhetoric as shallow and pretentious.
So we have a cultural bias linking truth with certain forms of expression: what one culture may regard as authentic, another may see as trivial.
As a culture’s forms of expression (media) evolve—from oral to writing, printing, the telegraph, and television—its ideas of truth also evolve. Today, we contend that “seeing is believing,” but in the past, depending on the medium, we might have argued that hearing, reading, counting, or feeling was believing.
Our concept of truth is closely related to what we think of as intelligence (ability to comprehend the truth). Different cultures mean different things by intelligence, again depending on their forms of communication. For example, in past oral cultures, an ability to remember proverbs and think up new ones were indications of intelligence. Solomon reportedly knew 3,000 proverbs.
In a print culture, intelligence relates to the printed word and encompasses:
The various ways of defining truth and intelligence aren't equal. Television has replaced a serious, logical, print-based epistemology, or understanding of the truth, with a shallow, image-driven one in which appearance rather than substance lends credibility.
Of course, print still exists to counter television’s simplistic presentation, but print has become much less powerful. The way we use print has changed—for instance, reading has a less central role in schools than it used to. Meanwhile, television has degraded our discourse around all aspects of public life, to the point that public discourse is increasingly incoherent and trivial. (Chapter 5 explains how.)
Television does have benefits—for instance, providing comfort and entertainment to those who are home-bound. Also, it can influence public opinion beneficially—its ability to appeal to emotions stirred opposition to the Vietnam War.
A new form of communication can help more than it harms or vice versa. For instance, among typography’s many effects, it led to the dominance of prose. As a result, poetry came to be viewed as elitist. Print fostered individualism while undermining the medieval sense of community. It elevated science, which had the side-effect of demeaning religion as superstition. However, on balance, print was more beneficial than harmful, as it shaped most modern ideas.
We don’t know what all of television’s effects will be in the future. While it has dangerously undermined the seriousness, clarity, and value of public discourse, there may be benefits we’re not yet aware of.
To understand just how much television has changed the way we think and talk, it’s necessary to contrast today’s shallow entertainment culture with the serious, rational print culture that shaped America from the colonists’ arrival in the New World through the 19th century.
In that era, print structured public discourse, influenced its content, and appealed to and required a certain kind of audience—one skilled at reading and thinking.
The colonists were avid readers, particularly of the Bible, but they brought many books with them from England and had others imported.
The literacy rate for all social classes was high. For instance, in Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1640-1700, the rate for men was between 89% and 95%. For women between 1681-1697, it was as high as 62%.
Religion (being able to read the Bible) was a driving factor. In addition, immigrants to New England came from more literate parts of the Old World, or were a more literate demographic. Further, most New England towns required a “reading and writing school”; larger ones required a grammar school also. Reading influenced political, religious, and social life.
Most reading was done with intent rather than casually. Since there were no media other than print, reading was the way people educated themselves and accessed public knowledge.
It would have been difficult to read by candlelight or lantern, and people had little “free” time. Thus, a farm boy reading while following a plow, a family reading the Bible on Sunday, or a merchant reading aloud announcements of ship arrivals were purposeful readers.
The modern idea of “reading comprehension” as something separate from the act of reading would have seemed ludicrous, because comprehending was the purpose of reading.
Reading was necessary to participate in public life. To the framers of the Constitution, literacy and reasoning ability were essential to self-governance. It’s why Thomas Jefferson advocated universal education, and why most states tried to ensure maturity and literacy by requiring voters to be at least 21.
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, had an immense audience, selling about 400,000 copies. The equivalent in 1985 would be a book selling 24 million copies.
In terms of capturing public attention, Paine’s feat would be comparable to the Super Bowl today.
Besides pamphlets, the earliest homegrown literature took the form of a newspaper started in 1690 in Boston. Printers like Benjamin Franklin also published journals, sermons, and “broadsides” carrying dueling opinions.
In the late 18th century, a national conversation developed around the Federalist Papers (85 essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, published in 1787-88), which were read widely.
Subscription libraries accessible to members only developed in the 1800s; “apprentices’ libraries” also developed for the working class. The McGuffey Reader was popular in schools, while adults read Walter Scott’s novels. Charles Dickens got a celebrity’s welcome to America in 1842.
Lecture halls were everywhere, even reaching to the frontier. People of all classes rushed to evening lectures after long days at work. Lectures at the Smithsonian Institution drew crowds of up to 1,500 to hear leading intellectuals and writers, including Horace Greeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Print influenced not only the discourse (what people talked about), but also its nature (the way they talked). People spoke as though they were reading. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that literate Americans didn’t converse—they held forth on topics at length as if they were presenting dissertations.
The public debates of the mid-19th century further illustrated how print shaped discourse. Print influenced both the speakers and listeners—they shared a way of thinking and understanding derived from reading.
Attending debates on the issues of the day was an important part of civic and social life. County and state fairs offered lineups of speakers in three-hour slots with equal time for opponents. “Stump” speaking, in which speakers held forth while standing on a tree stump, was also popular in the West.
Speakers used the style of the written word with long, complex sentences, as well as rhetorical devices such as sarcasm, irony, and metaphors, with confidence their audiences would be able to keep up. They could also rely on their listeners’ familiarity with history and current events.
Audiences had remarkable attention spans. They did get rowdy at times with shouting and applause—debates were, in part, social events—but audiences always took them seriously.
Although there were many debates, the Lincoln-Douglas debates stood out as among the most memorable. There were seven debates between Abraham Lincoln and incumbent U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, whom Lincoln was challenging for the Senate seat.
The first took place on Aug. 21, 1858, in Ottawa, Illinois. The format called for Douglas to speak for an hour, after which Lincoln would have an hour and a half to reply. This was much shorter than typical debates, including several in which the two men had faced off in the past. One of the earlier ones was seven hours—the audience took a dinner break and returned for the conclusion.
Lincoln and Douglas wrote their speeches in advance and also wrote out their rebuttals. Even their direct exchanges followed the syntax of the written word. They followed a scholarly format of argument, counterargument, references to and criticism of other texts, and a critique of past statements by the other party. Speaking in a form of explanatory prose, they appealed to the audience’s reason, not emotion.
As the debates illustrated, the print-centered discourse of 18th and 19th century America was rational, substantive, and serious.
It was serious because it grew out of reading, which is a serious and rational process. Readers need to follow a line of reasoning and recognize falsehoods, overgeneralizations, biases, contradictions, and failed logic. They must be able to make judgments, comparisons, and connections.
Reasoned, substantive discourse shaped by print extended well beyond political debate. Other types of public discourse included:
Historians have debated what drove early American progress—for instance, religious fervor, political aspiration, or a frontier spirit to keep pushing west. There were no doubt many factors—but a major one likely was the wide participation in a sophisticated public discourse.
You could call this period in America the Age of Exposition, characterized by a way of thinking, learning, and expression. Print culture required and enhanced the characteristics necessary for mature conversation or discourse—for instance, thinking rationally, coherently, and objectively.
But by the end of the 19th century, the Age of Exposition began giving way to the Age of Entertainment.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Americans were serious readers and thinkers. They read widely and attended public lectures and debates that delved into public issues in depth. Literacy was essential to participating in public life.
How much and what do you read in a typical week? Why do you read?
What public issue would you be able to discuss in depth, including context, history, and implications? How did you learn about this topic?
Which are you more inclined to believe—what you read or what you hear? Why?
Two technological developments in the mid-19th century changed public discourse and paved the way for the Age of Entertainment. The first was the invention of the telegraph, which removed the constraints on communication of speed and distance; the second was the development of photography, which replaced words with images.
By the mid-19th century, America had expanded to the Pacific. However, the difficulties of communicating over long distances limited national cohesion—the nation was a patchwork of regions with their own interests.
The problem was solved with the invention of the electrical telegraph, which could send messages over long distances in the form of coded pulses of electrical current transmitted through wires. By connecting the country with a communication network, the telegraph created the opportunity for a national conversation. But in the process, it redefined information and changed the meaning of public discourse altogether.
The telegraph undermined the key components of print-based discourse: relevance, usefulness, and coherence, which are closely related. These effects were exacerbated by newspapers—the penny press of the 1830s developed hand-in-hand with the telegraph.
The telegraph changed the definition of information by eliminating the requirement that it be relevant to the recipient.
Henry David Thoreau was one of the first to recognize that while the telegraph could send information great distances at lightning speed, a lot of what it sent might not be especially relevant to those on the receiving end. For instance, he wrote that connecting the old world with the new by running wires under the Atlantic was a dubious accomplishment if the system was used merely to report that Princess Adelaide had the whooping cough.
Newspapers played a role by seizing on the opportunity to obtain and publish information from far-flung places. Previously, they had focused mostly on community information relevant to local issues and decisions. But they soon began promoting non-local information received by telegraph and giving it greater prominence. Publishers rushed to back efforts to fully wire the nation.
Soon after the telegraph system spread, the Associated Press was founded in 1846 to gather information from around the world and disseminate it to everyone. Relevance had become irrelevant. Crimes, disasters, and wars, and other telegraphic content, were packaged and presented as “the news of the day.”
The telegraph and newspapers also decontextualized information and turned it into a commodity. It didn’t need to have a value to the recipient or serve any local purpose other than stirring interest or curiosity.
In oral and print-based cultures, information’s importance depended on its utility or the possibility it presented for action. You could do something with it to affect your life or community. However, the telegraph and subsequent technologies have disconnected information from action. We have an information glut and, at the same time, a diminished sense of agency or control.
Today, the ”news of the day” (unless it’s the weather forecast) rarely prompts you to do anything or helps you solve a problem. The news is something to talk about, but you can’t respond in any meaningful way. For instance, you can’t do anything about Middle East conflict, the crime rate, or unemployment. When the context is global, information disempowers.
Besides eliminating relevance and value, the telegraph undermined public discourse by making it incoherent.
Print culture’s strength is the exposition and analysis of information. The telegraph’s strength was simply moving information fast. Messages were quickly replaced by new messages with no connection to what came before or after.
Intelligence no longer meant understanding context or implications. It simply meant knowing a lot of disparate, fleeting things in the form of sensational headlines. The telegraph created a disorderly, disconnected conversation of strangers.
Adding to the telegraph’s assault on print culture and coherence was the development of photography in the 1840s and ‘50s, starting with the daguerreotype.
The early process of producing photos was complicated, involving an iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapor. But it soon evolved to a more efficient process of preparing a negative from which multiple positives could be made. Mass printing and publication of photos followed.
Like the telegraph, photos eliminate context. Photography removes images from context to present them in a different light. A photograph represents only an instant; it presents the world as disconnected moments or events. Photos can’t present ideas, only isolated objects.
Images have been around since the days of cave paintings, and they coexisted with words until photography launched an all-out war on language. Imagery—which quickly permeated American culture as photos, illustrations, posters, and advertisements—began to displace print in shaping our understanding of the world. While print culture viewed the world as rational, the growing image-based culture viewed it as chaotic and disconnected.
The image helped redefine information and news as having no continuity or importance apart from entertainment. “News” magazines such as Life and Look showcased dramatic or glamorous photographs lacking newsworthiness. Newspapers and advertisers learned that attention-grabbing images had a greater impact than explanatory writing. Seeing became more persuasive than reading and thinking.
The partnership of photography and the telegraph reshaped the news. Photos gave concreteness to faraway datelines. A photo, news story, and headline together created a feeling of context, but without any past or sense of continuity. It was a “pseudo-context,” created for information of no value beyond entertainment.
Today, since we still can’t use fragmented information for anything serious, we use it for entertainment and distraction—for example, in crossword puzzles, TV game shows, and games like Trivial Pursuit.
Photography and the telegraph didn’t kill print culture immediately—there was a burst of great literature in the early 20th century including magazine stories and novels by Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and others. But the era was print culture’s swan song.
The electronic media that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—television, film, and radio—accelerated the trends begun by the telegraph and photography. They created a disjointed, senseless world, where events constantly pop up and disappear from our view.
By providing a constant stream of compelling images unrelated to our lives, television culture has turned us from engaged citizens to a passive audience waiting to be entertained. Television tells us reality or life isn’t rational, so it must be entertaining.
Entertainment, in itself, isn’t a problem. The problem is that television and its metaphor of reality as entertainment have taken over our homes and reshaped every aspect of public life—education, religion, science, sports, news, and business—and how we understand it. We’ve come to judge everything by its entertainment value.
Television has attained myth status—a myth being a way of thinking so ingrained in our consciousness that we’re no longer aware of it. We don’t think about how television works or what it can do. We don’t think about how it affects us or our culture. It is our culture.
Television has become the background sound of our lives. The world it creates seems familiar and natural. We don’t notice how it shapes what we believe to be the truth or reality. When something doesn’t seem strange, it means we’ve adjusted to it by changing ourselves.
We’ve so completely accepted television’s metaphor of reality that we mistake its irrelevance for substance and its incoherence for meaning. Anything that doesn’t fit television’s frame seems strange rather than the other way around. (Shortform note: Postman doesn’t give examples, but a contemporary example would be how we dismiss and “tune out” public officials who discuss nuances of issues; instead, we expect them to speak in entertaining sound bites.)
The purpose of this book is to make visible television’s epistemology—how it shapes truth, knowledge, and reality, and how it’s transforming our national culture and conversation into entertainment.
In television’s early stages, some people hoped it could be used to support and extend literacy. However, it was a false hope representing what McLuhan called “rear-view mirror thinking”—viewing a new technology as an extension of the old—for instance, thinking of a car as a fast horse or a lightbulb as a stronger candle.
Television doesn’t extend literacy, but it directly attacks it. Unlike reading, television offers a constantly changing spectacle that provides emotional gratification without demanding literacy or any particular thinking skills to understand it.
It’s entertaining, which, again, isn’t a problem in itself—but television goes further to suggest that we should naturally judge everything by its entertainment value. And television presents all content or subject matter as entertainment. This is antithetical to print culture’s treatment of information as rational and having a useful purpose—for instance, action or reflection.
Unlike good exposition, which is about communicating ideas, good television is about presenting images. On television, attempted conversations about serious topics are fragmented, shallow, and lack context—even documentaries don’t dwell on a point for long or connect it to what comes next.
For a speaker to pause and think about a point or express uncertainty isn’t a good image and therefore isn’t good television. Television demands a performance that aims for applause, which is the whole point. Content must give way to the values of show business.
Television defines and reflects our culture—we learn what our culture is from television, and we expect life to conform to television. Shakespeare wrote that “all the world’s a stage,” to which television adds, the stage is Las Vegas. Television thus dictates discourse both on- and off-screen.
As print culture once influenced the way we practiced politics, religion, business, and education, television shapes our behavior in those arenas today:
It’s getting harder to determine what’s show business and what isn’t. Teachers perform for students, surgeons perform and narrate surgery for television audiences, and churches “modernize” their services with music and performances.
In the Age of Television, show business or entertainment values drive every form of information exchange. To paraphrase the popular song, “There’s no business but show business.”
At the time this book was written, the phrase, “Now, this …” was commonly used on television newscasts to signal a transition to a lighter story or a commercial. However, on another level, the phrase was an acknowledgement that television’s presentation of the world had no coherence or meaning.
The problem is that when news is presented without seriousness, context, coherence, or rationality—the criteria for judging credibility in print culture—it’s difficult for a TV audience to know what to believe. Here again, television has changed the meaning of both information and credibility.
In the past, information was believed if it reflected reality. In contrast, on television, whether a message is deemed truthful depends on the attractiveness, authority, and authenticity projected by the presenter/performer.
This has serious implications. If credibility on television (not actual truthfulness) is what counts, politicians don’t have to tell the truth—they just have to appear sincere. Thus, Nixon’s biggest problem wasn’t lying, but looking like a liar on television.
In contrast, Ronald Reagan, a former actor, looked good and came across as so sincere on television that his frequent distortions and misrepresentations didn’t undercut his popularity or likeability. In fact, as public interest in his presidential misstatements declined after some initial news coverage, so did further reporting on them.
Thanks to television, Americans may be the most entertained nation on earth, while at the same time, the least well-informed.
Even when events get widespread news coverage, people still know little in terms of history, context, or implications. Yet everyone has an opinion. But today, opinions are more like emotions than they are like the nuanced and informed opinions people formed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Polling indicates that today’s opinions change, like emotions, from one day or week to the next.
The information Americans possess is really a type of disinformation. In the 1980s, disinformation referred to bits and pieces of misleading information spread by Soviet and U.S. spies, which created a false sense of knowledge. Disinformation is also a consequence of packaging news as entertainment. We know about a lot of things without knowing anything in any depth.
However, there’s a worse prospect than lacking good information—it’s no longer even knowing what it means to be well-informed. Ignorance can be remedied—unless people mistake it for knowledge.
Another problem when news and information are presented in discontinuous fragments is that people become accustomed to incoherence. This makes it even harder to assess truth.
Many of Reagan’s misstatements were contradictions—he made assertions that were mutually exclusive—that is, two statements couldn’t both be true in the same context. However, he got away with some contradictions (as other politicians also do) when his statements were reported as isolated fragments and not compared to each other. When statements are presented without context, contradictions disappear.
We’re so used to getting information in fragments that we don’t look for coherence and so, don’t recognize contradictions.
This isn’t Orwell’s world of “newspeak,” where lies are presented as truth. It’s Huxley’s world, where there’s no need for authorities to hide information—people are so distracted by a system organized for their amusement that they accept illogic and don’t recognize contradictions.
We live in an information environment that could be labeled Trivial Pursuit, like the board game, where facts and news are a source of entertainment.
Television determines what form news takes and how we respond to it. In organizing and packaging news as entertainment, television influences other media—newspapers, magazines, and radio—to follow suit.
For instance, USA Today was modeled on the format of television: it pioneered the presentation of brief stories, color graphics, and many images. This resonated with other newspapers, which did the same thing. People magazine became another example of a print publication echoing television by presenting news as entertainment. Meanwhile, Entertainment Tonight and similar television programs portrayed entertainment as serious news. In a closed loop, news became entertainment in both form and content.
Meanwhile, radio expanded from music to entertainment by incorporating talk shows with a format that appealed to listeners’ emotions and amused them with insults.
Nations throughout history have overcome lies, but whether a culture can survive trivialization of news remains to be seen.
Neil Postman argues that Americans are well entertained but poorly informed because the news we receive is fragmented, incoherent, and selected for its entertainment value. In addition, we don’t question it.
Where do you get most of your news? Why do you use this medium?
Could the form in which you receive that information be a problem? Why or why not?
What does being well-informed mean to you? How could you be better informed?
When a form of discourse transitions from one medium to another, a lot may be lost or significantly changed in the translation, including tone, meaning, and value.
For example, poetry often translates poorly to another language; a condolence expressed by a card is different from one offered in person; and instruction by a computer differs from face-to-face instruction by a teacher.
As the medium of television has changed print-based conceptions and expectations of politics, news, and information, it’s also changing the essence of religion, in both message and presentation.
In 42 hours of watching religious programming in the 1980s, the author concluded:
Yet television preachers seem to assume that the meaning and quality of church-based religious experience translates to television.
This is because they’re dazzled and deluded by gaining access to huge audiences. For example, Billy Graham extolled television as “the most powerful tool of communication ever devised by man.” Pat Robertson contended in the 1980s that the church would be foolish not to use such an influential force. While the delivery method is different, he said, the message stays the same. For many years, Robertson hosted the talk show-style religious program, The 700 Club.
But the message conforms to the medium. When the medium changes, the message also changes.
Television and its environment negate the traditional religious experience in several ways:
1) The sacred environment of a church can’t be duplicated on television. Churches by design create an atmosphere conducive for enacting religious rituals. Services can be performed outside, but the environment of a church must be recreated with symbols and sacred objects. The environment prompts people to behave in certain ways in church, which can’t be achieved at home in front of a television. In addition, the church atmosphere helps create a state of mind receptive to a religious experience; again, this doesn’t happen with television.
2) Television is associated in people’s minds with secularism, or other events and entertainment. Viewers are constantly aware of the option to switch channels to another event. Religious programs are bookended with secular programming and commercials—so television’s main message of non-stop entertainment speaks louder than religion’s message of reflection.
Television preachers realize this and design their shows to attract audiences, with lavish sets, images, and even secular actors who endorse them.
Television’s bias toward satisfying an audience means that TV preachers have to go beyond spectacle—and give people something they want.
Throughout history, great religious leaders have given people what they needed rather than what they wanted. Nonetheless, religious programs strive to make people feel good. They extol affluence—audiences are encouraged to strive for wealth or celebrate it if they have it. This also seems to put them into a mood to contribute millions to their favorite preachers, who become celebrities. God becomes subordinate.
Thus, television transforms personally challenging religions like Christianity into something easy, self-serving, and trivial—which isn’t a religion at all.
Television has also changed, if not undermined, the central idea of capitalism.
An outgrowth of the Enlightenment, capitalism envisioned reasonable, informed buyers and sellers engaging rationally in transactions of mutual interest and benefit. In a competitive marketplace, value would be paramount—buyers could recognize value and wouldn’t buy a bad product.
However, television—or more specifically, the television commercial—upends this model of the consumer as rational. Making a rational decision requires a discourse: the seller makes a proposition, or claims about the products, which the buyer subjects to rational analysis.
But commercials don’t make product claims. They’re based on images—not words—designed to appeal to emotions; they’re mini-dramas. For a commercial, truth is irrelevant—the viewer can like or hate it, but he can’t refute it.
Television has shifted the focus of advertising from the nature and quality of the product to the character of the consumer—that is, to his fantasies and concerns, deduced from market research. Businesses aim to make consumers feel good by reassuring them through commercial psychodramas.
The mentality of commercials has spilled from business into politics. We choose politicians the way we choose products—based on how their television image makes us feel.
And commercials have become the dominant method of presenting political ideas, which has devastated political discourse.
Our political knowledge takes the form, not of words, but of pictures planted in our minds by TV ads. A 30-second ad means more than a detailed position paper. Political ads tell us that our country’s problems are as easily solvable as replacing lost travelers’ checks. (Shortform note: There was a long-running TV ad campaign about lost travelers’ checks.)
Politicians are celebrities and sources of entertainment. In fact, celebrity has superseded political party in influencing our choice of candidates. Their television images are aimed at making us feel better rather than telling us why they would do the better job.
As the television commercial is substance-free so it can work on an emotional level, “image politics” is also free of context, ideology, and information.
Television has changed our relationship with our own history. History has context; television creates an incoherent present.
Orwell believed an authoritarian state would destroy history; however, in a world more like the one envisioned by Huxley, we’re voluntarily giving history up in favor of image, immediacy, and feeling good.
Television controlled by corporations rather than the state also threatens the foundation of democracy: freedom of information. Orwell thought the state would control information by banning books, as many oppressive governments have done. The Founding Fathers wrote the Bill of Rights to prevent government control of information. But television controls the flow of ideas by defining public discourse in America as entertainment.
Public education, too, has fallen under the influence and dictates of television, which is redefining knowledge and how to acquire it.
The transition began in 1969 with the introduction of Sesame Street, which most children, parents, and educators immediately loved. Parents liked it because it made them feel good about letting kids watch TV. Teachers liked it because it made it easier to teach children to read.
But while it has helped to teach reading, television has undermined teaching and learning in the same way it’s undermined other aspects of public life.
Teachers thought television would teach children to love school. But television teaches children to love school only when it’s entertaining like Sesame Street. It sabotages the idea of traditional schooling in that:
Most important, television teaches children to love television—being entertained—more than learning.
With its influence over the time and attention of children, television overwhelms the school curriculum.
Television has rewritten educational philosophy by decreeing that teaching must be entertaining, that children learn better when they’re being entertained.
Television’s philosophy of education eliminates three tenets of traditional learning:
Education presented without prerequisites, challenges, and exposition is merely entertainment.
As a result of television’s redefinition of education, classrooms have lost their primacy, while teachers have remodeled classrooms and teaching methods after television. They’ve made incorporated multimedia and reduced exposition, reading, and writing.
Children are thus prepared to expect entertainment throughout their lives—from commerce, religion, news, and politics.
When a nation defines its culture as non-stop entertainment, it’s at risk of cultural disintegration. In America, Huxley’s predictions are coming to fruition. With our full embrace of television, we’ve unconsciously undertaken an experiment in giving ourselves over to the distractions of technology.
An Orwellian threat would be more obvious—we know what authoritarianism looks like. But we haven’t recognized entertainment technology as our ideology. Like an ideology, television imposes a system of ideas and ideals, a way of life. It’s launched a cultural revolution in America without discussion, a vote, or resistance.
So how do we save ourselves from a Huxleyan fate? Of course, not everyone will think it’s necessary, but for those who do, there are only a few paths.
First, realize that Americans will never give up any technology. It also isn’t possible to limit people’s use of technology, although there may be temporary benefits from voluntary efforts like designating a TV turnoff month.
We could do more to limit certain content on television—like violence or ads on children’s shows—the way we banned cigarette advertising. Also, we could try to improve quality, but remember, television is most damaging when it co-opts serious discourse in news, politics, religion, science, or education, and turns it into entertainment. We’d be better off with bad television.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t what we watch, it’s how. Since television is most dangerous when we’re oblivious to what it’s doing, the only viable solution is to see and question what we’re seeing. By asking questions, we demystify and break television’s or technology’s spell over us.
Some of the questions we should ask and answer are:
We don’t need to agree on the answers; just asking the questions activates and reorients our minds. These and other questions are as applicable to computers as to television. For instance, computers teach us that all we need in order to solve any problem is sufficient data. However, data won’t address most personal problems, and it may be that computers ultimately create as many problems as they solve.
Only by seeing and understanding what it’s doing can we hope to gain control over television, the computer, or any other technology. The problem in Huxley’s Brave New World wasn’t that people were happy and laughing without thinking. It was that they’d forgotten what they were laughing about and why they’d stopped thinking.
Neil Postman argued that we may be headed for a Brave New World scenario where entertainment technology rather than democracy is becoming our ideology. To regain control we need to question how technology affects our thinking.
What does democracy mean to you? What are its foundations?
Do the media you use most build on or erode democracy? Do they make you a better or worse citizen? How?
How do these technologies free you and constrain you?
How can you control your technology rather than being controlled by it?