Book Review: Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

Reading Neil Postman in 2025.

We know how this story ends. Or, we know what, at this point, the political and cultural apotheosis of this turn of events has pruduced: Donald Trump and MAGA.

Reading Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), nearly forty years after its release date, knowing how to understand it in its context and in our context, has been a revealing and interesting read. Neil Postman’s book, whose subtitle is Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, stands up remarkably well. And I personally believe that his thesis has not been overstated.

In short, Postman’s thesis is that in the transition that our country’s public discourse took, from the Age of Exposition, comprised of typography as the dominant form of communication and culture, which, though not perfectly, promotes rationality, conceptual thinking, deduction, reason and order, detachment and objectivity, first disrupted by telegraphy and photography, and, at his point of writing in the early to mid-1980s, colonized and totally taken over by the rise of television, which brought us into the Age of Show Business, produced a culture and thus, minds, comprised of triviality, discontinuous “facts” and “pseudo-events,” necessarily disconnected from history, time and place, where the ultimate value is entertainment is something that must be understood because the only way out is through, is something to take quite seriously.

I’ve had this book on my “to read” list for quite some time, but the precipitating cause for me to decide that now is the time to read it was listening to a recent conversation between Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein, which was setup to discuss Hayes’ new book on attention and the “attention economy” called The Sirens Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, out this Tuesday (1/28/2025). At the end of the conversation, Klein asked Hayes “what are three books you recommend to the listeners?” and one of the Hayes’ chose was Postman’s book. They both agreed that is was the “GOAT” regarding attention, media, and so forth, and, to quote Klein, “somewhat predicts Donald Trump in an explicit way.” I thought that now, before I get to Hayes’ new book itself, would be a great time for me to read it.

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The “forward” of Amusing Ourselves to Death, was a comparison of 1984 and Brave New World, that you might have seen going around in comic form or video form about, oh, 12 years ago online, that juxtaposes two dystopian visions, allowing the reader to decide which dystopia best represents the world they are living in now; one a totalitarian state-controlled world built on censorship and externally-imposed oppression where physical and psychological pain is used as means of total control (this is the Orwell world of 1984); the other option, based on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where oppression that strips away maturity, autonomy, and history, will be freely chosen by a people who “adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think” (xxi). For Postman’s Age of Show Business best represented by the rise of television, which became culture itself, and became the “meta-medium” of 20^th and now 21^st century America, Huxley’s Brave New World best captures what happened to us, at least in the U.S., than Orwell’s vision. It’s extremely hard to disagree with Postman here.

Perhaps ironically though, that section is a mere two pages, and itself has been used as an entertaining way of trivia, that misses the broader argument that Postman was hoping to make. I’ll try to do his book justice here by treating it seriously as a piece of social commentary with real social importance.

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The sequence of the book shows a real appreciation for exposition and the importance of context and comprehension. Postman starts by explaining that mediums are the “social and intellectual environment a machine creates” and that all technologies of communication have biases that are not neutral. Building off of Marshall McLulan’s “the medium is the message,” Postman explains how mediums produce metaphors and that metaphors literally create the content that becomes how we think; it becomes culture. The written word has its own set, so do photographs. Television’s metaphors are flat, one-dimensional, de-contextaulized.

One worries that critiques like this can come across as pretentious, but I have two thoughts about that. Look where we are. If your raising kids, starting businesses, attending community events, playing sports, etc. as an adult, you have to really stop caring about coming across however. And second, Postman says the worst TV is what TV is for. Reality TV, etc. are what TV is for; and mindless consumption of entertainment, as an act of relaxing and hanging out is not the problem:

TV as the “meta-medium” to do politics, consume news, think through real tough problems, do and receive an education, and so on, is always going to fail, due to the nature of the medium.

In chapter after chapter, Postman convincingly shows the age of show business and TV’s impact on various aspects of our lives. In the penultimate chapter, “Teaching as an Amusing Activity,” he discusses how the expectation of amusement and entertainment when one is ostensibly expecting to learn about something, prioritizes shallow engagement that is quick, fast-paced, and fun when true education is hard as fuck, slow, and leaves you feeling satisfied and consumed; leaves you feeling like there is so much more to learn. A country that expects 24/7 entertainment produces people who feel “bored” when reading long texts that don’t have a pinball or slot-machine like payoff.

In the chapter before that one, “Reach Out and Elect Someone,” Postman argues that political campaigns in the TV age of America have incentivized beauty, slick talking, image, charisma, style over substance. One can engage in pathos through the written word; one can engage in emotional appeals in every medium, and emotional appeals aren’t bad per se. But for a seriously sustained liberal democratic republic experiment that is the U.S., politics can’t be about who is the best influencer or performer or who can evoke the most sordid, scary, or utopian images, for that matter, in your brain.

Taking from Postman, I wish a rule-of-thumb would become a meme: if you are feeling super entertained like you are at an amusement park or watching a movie when engaging in serious real-world subjects and topics like trade, taxation, education, environmental policy, law, civil rights, current affairs, foreign policy, and unchallenged or like the person you are watching is simply patting you on the back and making you feel good, you probably are being entertained, sure; but you have to ask yourself: am I becoming truly informed to become a citizen?

TV as the medium, which is the “social and intellectual environment a machine creates” (84) creates a culture that privileges pathos, or emotions, over logos (reasons) and ethical development.

Donald Trump became a household name dictating “Your’re fired!” on the hit show The Apprentice. Before that he was a frequent call-in guest and TV talk show guest dozens of times, where he exalted himself and himself only. He even posed as his own publicist. He also didn’t just start spreading lies in 2015; he’s been doing that in his books, in newspaper ads, and on the same above venues since the 1980s. When he wasn’t talking about how great he was, the one issue that he seemed to focus on was trade and now we are all going to live through his policy ideas about it. He certainly didn’t learn about trade policy, deficits, and modern economic theory through reading papers or books; that’s self-evident. But he looked real good on TV. And he had a sort of charisma about him, even though you had to squint to see it, in my opinion. Now the emperor has no clothes. But a TV-drenched culture doesn’t know what clothes it even want to see at this point.

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There are plenty of theories and explanations as to how we got to this moment. I can talk about most of them in some detail; and I’m not even saying that this idea here by Postman is the most important. But ideas about how to know; and how our brains are shaped by culture and its dominant media environments absolutely have to be discussed alongside and with what some would say are more material-based theories, such as economic.

Thanks,
Patrick M. Foran