1. Amusing Ourselves to Death
Alondra Lopez, Kelsey Keegan, Jonathan Een Newton,
Rosa Haxton
Rosa

2. “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
jonathan

3. Discussion Question How much do you value how funny a professor is?
Do you believe that you remember things better when they are humorous?
jonathan

4. “Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us
“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, is right.”
alondra

5. Amusing Ourselves to Death Comic
jonathan

6. Amusing Ourselves to Death
Postman states that his book is “an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the 20th century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television.”
Can these two very different types of media accommodate the same ideas?
Rosa
Postman does not reject television
When television tries to arise to high aspirations, then issues arrise
Video we start watching at 9min
K – Easch medium is appropriate for dif kinds of knowledge
-reading – requires intense intellectual involvment (interactive), whereas (“Cold” )
TV – requires passive involvement (“Hot” Media)
Pg. 16

7. Ch. 1 - The Medium is the Metaphor
Postman agrees with McLuhan, but says his model needs revision:
Message VS. Metaphor definitions
“We start from the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself” (14).
Kelsey
Message – denotes specific, concrete statement about the world. BUT – the forms of our media don’t make such statements
Media is more like a Metaphor – an unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce special definitions of reality.
- our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequence it, frame it
Ex} TV doesn’t explicitly say politicians are beautiful – more unconscious, subliminal
In understanding media’s metaphorical function, must take into account the:
Symbolic forms of their information,
Source of their info,
Quantity & speed of their info, &
Context in which their info is experienced
Easier to think about/dig into these thoughts if:
“We start from the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself” (14).

8. Evolution of Media Oral, print, television, computer. Alondra
Can you give examples of what type of information is more valued through each of these forms of media? And what would you except as being more reliable?

9. Charlie Brooker: How to report the News
“American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of their display…” (4).
Jonathan
K- politics has ceased to be about a candidate's ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television.

10. Ch. 2 - Media as Epistemology
Postman’s definition of Epistemology – “complex & usually opaque subject concerned with the origins & nature of knowledge” (17).
Definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed
Alondra

11. Ch. 2 - Media as Epistemology
“Through resonance,” according to Northrop Frye, “a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance” (17).
“Every medium of communication […] has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large” (18).
Rosa

12. Discussion Question
Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in the mid 1980's.
What do you think Postman would say of our current media phenomena and the implications of their ubiquitous nature today?
Is television still a problem? How has the internet changed things?
Kelsey