Still Amusing Ourselves to Death

            Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is simply one of the best ways to frame the purpose and underlying goal of television and in a larger sense, media as a whole. In arguing for Huxley’s view of negative utopia, Postman is making plain the many and varied flaws our modern world of non-stop entertain and distraction contains. I first discovered Postman five years ago during a conversation about Orwell’s 1984. In talking to a friend about my fears for the future of our system of governance, I speculated on how wrong and at once right Orwell was: we are subjects to a strict set of controls, but they are nearly invisible, unlike Orwell’s blatant and forceful ideas of censorship and social modeling. As we talked, this friend suggested I read “Amusing …” to get a modern perspective on the phenomenon of invisible control that takes place all around us. I’d never read the book before, so I eagerly grabbed a copy.

            I was utterly engrossed by that first reading, taking in the entire book in the matter of a couple days. I very distinctly remember telling everyone I knew about how important it was to read this work. I felt personally ashamed that I’d been reading for more than ten years and had never come across Postman. I sought to rectify this by spreading his message and thoughts to anyone I knew who was willing to listen. I still am stunned by my father’s solution to my endless droning about how awful television is – he would simply turn up the volume and ignore me. Talk about feeding fuel to the fire!

            Postman reinforces and makes clear the damage a media culture does to the wellbeing and thoughtfulness of a society. In the early chapters, breaking down the many phases of culture American’s have gone through in route to our current state of extreme distraction, Postman makes a point that I have repeated and heard repeated numerous times: “the medium is the metaphor”. Postman argues that “[e]ach medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility” (Postman, 10). The mode of discourse for the written word is thoughtful and inflective. The reader must patiently process each word, sentence and paragraph, forming for themselves ideas based off the author’s own. This process is collective and ever expanding; a reader can react and respond with their own writing or oral argument for or against the original author’s, opening a conversation that can lead to deeper understanding for all parties.

            Television, and to a large extent the growing medium of the personal computer, offer a different sort of medium. Television in particular is a one sided delivery system for media. There is little to no conversation – the viewer watches what the media producers offer, is either entertained or is not, and decides whether to continue viewing based on this. There is little room for conversation or the meeting of minds in a television culture. And since television is a far more accessible and simple mode of delivery, individuals who lack the stomach for deep reading and consideration can simply plunk down in front of the TV and become immersed in what they delude themselves into think is culture, information and ultimately, entertainment.

            The effect of television on culture is unmistakable: people are less actively interested in confronting what is actually being presented. Television viewing is a one-way street, from the producers to the viewer with little to no recourse for the viewer’s input. Society becomes less involved and more entertained. It’s a frightening state of being, but the simple, addictive pleasure of being a consumer, a viewer, is hard to argue with. I know I personally grew up on the television. Sesame Street, a particular target of Postman’s, played an enormous role in my childhood. It was a means of casting off responsibility for my parents, who were less interested in raising a knowledgeable child than in enjoying their own opportunities for distraction. Sesame Street, proclaiming itself a potent use of the television medium in teaching a generation, may have imbued certain amounts of knowledge and problem solving skills, basic math and the like, but at the cost of our attention spans.

            The first time reading Postman, I was appalled by what he had to say about Sesame Street. I felt as if a huge part of my childhood was being shown in a new, disturbing light. If I wasn’t learning basic math and social etiquette from Big Bird and Oscar, what was I learning? It would seem I was predominantly learning how to be a good consumer of television, willing being absorbed into a culture of distraction and amusement, while fooling myself into believing it to be the best possible way to learn. How could it now be? The television wouldn’t lie to me, would it?

            Yet this is what Postman is telling us in “Amusing …”, that television is lying to us. It is a medium of distraction and entertainment, feigning importance and acting as if it has the answers to our problems. As earlier technologies like the telegraph showed us, the quality of information has taken a back seat to the abilities of the medium. How much information can the television contain? How far reaching can it be? How quickly can it extend across the globe? These questions have become the talk of media, with little or no regard for what is being extended. Postman puts it quite well: “in a sea of information, there is very little of it to use” (Postman, 67). We care more about how much information we can access and less about how that information affects us.

            This danger of subsuming knowledge for amusement should be at the front of everyone’s mind as we delve deeper into the “information age”. Technology marches on, with computers growing exponentially smaller and faster with each year. I can hold in my hands via a smart phone more information than people of a hundred years ago could hope to amass in a life time. The flip side of this is that I could not possible have need of that vast an amount of information and without a clear use for this knowledge, I flounder and find myself distracted without applying any of it.

            Perhaps most pertinent to our current state of being is Postman’s ninth chapter, “Reach Out and Elect Someone”. In this election year with corporate funding of politicians at an unheard of height, we run the risk of being amused into electing a politician without even thinking about how that politician might affect the issues that pertain to our lives.