-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.pdf

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman

PENGUIN books

AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH

Neil Postman--critic, writer, educator, and communications theorist--is

chairman of the Department of Communication Arts at New York University

and founder of its program in Media Ecology. Educated at the State

University of New York and Columbia University, he is holder of the

Christian Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching and is also editor

of Et Cetera, the journal of general semantics. His books include

Technopoly and How To Watch TV News (with Steve Powers).

He is married and has three children and lives in Flushing, New York.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Nell Postman

PENGUIN books

PENGUIN books Published by the Penguin Group Penguin books USA Inc., 375

Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

Penguin books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin books Canada Lid, I0 AIcom Avenue, Toronto. Ontario, Canada M4V

3B2

Penguin books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc.

1985 Published in Penguin books 1986

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the New York Times Company for

permission to reprint from "Combining the books, Computers" by Edward

Fiske, which appeared in the August 7, 1984, issue of the New York

Times. Copyright the New York times Company.

A section of this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg

Scholars Program, Annenberg School of Communications, University of

Southern California.

Specifically, portions of chapters six and seven formed part of a paper

delivered at the Scholars Conference, "Creating Meaning: Literacies of

Our Time," February 1984.

Library of Congress Catalog Information Postman, Neill..

Amusing ourselves to death.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Mass media -- Influence. I. Title.

P94.P63 1986 302.2'34 86-9513

ISBN 0 14 00.9438 5

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Linotron Meridien

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the

condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise distributed without the publisher's

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which

it is published and without a similar condition including this condition

being imposed on the subsequent purchase

Contents

Foreword

Part I

the Medium Is the Metaphor

Media as Epistemology

Typographic America

the Typographic Mind

the Peek-a-Boo World

Part II

the Age of Show Business

"Now... This"

Shuffle Off to Bethlehem

Reach Out and Elect Someone

Teaching as an Amusing Activity

the Huxleyan Warning

Notes Bibliography

Foreword

We were keeping our eye on .1984. When the year came and the prophecy

didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. the

roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had

happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was

another--slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling:

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among

the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell

warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But

in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of

their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to

love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their

capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared

was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no

one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of

information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we

would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth

would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in

a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.

Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some

equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal

bumblepuppy. As Huxley re

marked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and

rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take

into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984,

Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New

World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell

feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love

will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Part I.

the Medium Is the Metaphor

At different times in our historY, different cities have been the focal

point of a radiating American spirit. In the late eighteenth centurY,

for example, Boston was the center of a political radicalism that

ignited a shot heard round the world--a shot that could not have been

fired any other place but the suburbs of Boston. At its report, all

Americans, including Virginians,, became Bostonians at heart. In the

mid-nineteenth centurY, New York became the symbol of the idea of a

melting-pot America--or at least a non-English one--as the wretched

refuse from all over the world disembarked at Ellis Island and spread

over the land their strange languages and even stranger ways. In the

early twentieth centurY, Chicago, the city of big shoulders and heavy

winds, came to symbolize the industrial energy and dynamism of America.

If there is-a statue of a hog butcher somewhere in Chicago, then it

stands as a reminder of the time when America was railroads, cattle,

steel mills and entrepreneurial adventures. If there is no such statue,

there ought to be, just as there is a statue of a Minute Man to recall

the Age of Boston, as the Statue of Liberty recalls the Age of New York.

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