Amusing Ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

The Medium is the Metaphor Boston (The Revolutionary War) New York (Ellis Island) Las Vegas???: “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death” (4).

The Medium is the Metaphor “…this book is an inquiry into and lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas” (8).

The Medium is the Metaphor “Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Which, of course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the medium is the message. His aphorism, however is in need of amendment because, as it stands, it may lead one to confuse a message with a metaphor…

The Medium is the Metaphor …A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality (10).”

The Medium is the Metaphor “Where do our notions of mind come from if not from metaphors generated by our tools” (15).

Media as Epistemology Oral skills (25) –Memory, Performance Skills Print skills (25) –Immobility of the body –Focus on meaning (not appearance) –Detachment / Objectivity (critical skills) –Comprehension –Delayed gratification –Abstraction

Typographic America Widespread literacy and schools in 17 th Century England. Widespread literacy in the colonies. Common Sense (1776) by Thomas Paine. Federalist Papers (1787/1788) by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

The Typographic Mind Skills of the Reader: –Following a line of thought Classification Inference-making Reasoning –Critical reading –Comparison of ideas –Connect generalizations –Detachment –Delayed Gratification

The Typographic Mind Effects of literacy on culture –Science –Capitalism –Secularization –Continuous progress

The Typographic Mind “To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community” (50). –“Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that vicious.” (Nietzche, Ecce Homo, 1888)

The Peek-a-Boo World “Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world – a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self- contained” (77).