Amusing Ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Neil Postman Author of The Disappearance of Childhood

Ideas Worth Noting This book takes a closer look at one of the most dominant aspects of modern technology, the television, and what implications it has had on society. – Conditioned to expect rather than look for information The introduction of “Now This” – Made all aspects of modern perception more materialistic and shallow – Took society from “’The Age of Reason’ the pinnacle of modern thinking” to the age of entertainment where people perceive the greatest minds in society as faces and “well organized soundbites”

Ideas continued Implications on Literature and Culture – The literary culture of society has been eminently damaged by the television which neither “extends or amplifies literature culture. It attacks it” – Public discourse represents America going from a very sophisticated ideological superpower to a society ran on images and sounds rather than critical thinking and philosophy

Summarizing the text The book highlights a number of important issues that, though not directly related, all had a greater meaning to the main idea. The book opens by explaining how the human brains are organized in metaphors, for example Ex: Las Vegas is the entertainment city – New York City is a melting pot Medium is a Metaphor – Everyone processes information differently

Summary continued As the book progresses he raises several other ideas relating to society’s enslavement to their entertainment overlords – Huxleyian society Television is the equivalent to soma in that people are knowingly sacrificing their right to curiosity, thought, and practical thinking in exchange for mindless entertainment and bliss – The Typographic Mind The mentality that expressing ideas through writing is virtually obsolete in a world dominated by visual stimuli

End to Summary “Now This” – Demonstrates the mindlessness that goes into television by showing how two completely unrelated ideas can be strung together by simple words. “’Now This’ is commonly used on radio and television news casts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relavence to what one is about to hear or see” Teaching as an Amusing Activity – The act of learning, once seen as an intellectual exercise, has been reduced to the level of entertainment changing the way our brains process information from a young age. “We now know that ‘Sesame Street’ encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street” “If the classroom now begins to seem a stale and flat environment for learning, the inventors of television its self are to blame” Pg.143