I can't believe this was published almost 40 years ago. The introduction said it better than I could: "This is a 21st-century book published in the 20th century." Amusing Ourselves to Death is a clarion call to the inherent civic dangers when the written word is no longer the primary medium of expression. Postman argues that when we turn towards the segmented and corporate television set, not only is our society's conversational and debate ability suffer, it changes the literal makeup of thought. It's eerily prescient in a day of all-consuming social media and a sizable amount of the country addicted to TikTok, somehow an even more dystopian iteration of the moving image.

I didn't think this book would be as good as it was: it's coherently structured, based on strong historical reasoning, and generally very well-written. Not only that, but it's comfortable to read. While a bit dense, it feels like eating your grandmother's kitchen-sink stew: not always easy to get down, but so, so good for you.

Postman scrive nel 1984, e partendo da Orwell si muove a dimostrare che la profezia più calzante è in realtà stata quella di Huxley. Su questa tesi si basa l'intero libro e la sua critica della TV come medium in grado di costruire un'epistemologia basata sull'apprendimento capace di influenzare l'intera società. Testo forse un po' "attempato", utile leggerlo oggi insieme a Televisione di Freccero, che ne rappresenta un aggiornamento e un adattamento allo specifico italiano. ( )

Great book, amazingly prescient for its time (written in the mid-1980s).

Touches on lots of different ideas and themes around public discourse. My favorite is how the age of the telegraph and beyond basically created what we call "news"... information that doesn't affect our daily lives and that we have nothing we can do about it/with it, but is delivered to us anyways because that's what the medium does.

It's basically a more in-depth version of "Society of the Spectacle".

My one complaint is that the first part of the book is devoted to a mythologized "age of reason" which was during the height of the printing press, just pre-telegraph. Back then, public discourse was based on the written word rather than on image, and the author argues this makes for better public discourse.

I disagree. This was the height of colonialism, with elaborate-reasoned justifications around the world for mass-scale atrocities. Having well-reasoned arguments does not make them better than, say, compelling visual arguments. You can create a well-reasoned document justifying the Vietnam war, and can counter with 3 minutes of real-life war footage and have the latter be better than the former. I think the only difference is that we've been taught the ins-and-outs of reasoned discourse in school, so we can understand, critique and deconstruct it better. We generally haven't been taught the ins-and-outs of visual media (like TV), so we can't talk about it in the same way.

In the end, the best way to deal with new media (TV, Twitter, YouTube) is with better media literacy, which is actually the exact thing the author advocates ( )

Essentially a redux of Marshall McLuhan’s The Media is the Message, it’s an argument that the dominant communications media powerfully affect reasoning (Postman’s preferred term is epistemology, which is probably more accurate and to the point), and that we were a lot better off as individuals and as a body politic when that effect came primarily from print rather than TV and other visual media. He makes a pretty strong case. Although he’s not happy about things, he’s not a ranting old crank like some Yale literary critics. He maintains a sense of humor, he’s a good writer, and he’s down to earth, straightforward and concise (while McLuhan can be otherwise). Well worth the read. ( )

Good book on the lack of seriousness in America. ( )