A Series of Idiosyncratic Events
If Neil Postman, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell walked into a bar…
Amusing Ourselves to Death
The article below is the first half of a paper I wrote for a Rhetoric course. My paper was a critique of Neil Postman’s chapter The Peek-a-Boo-World, in which he essentially blames the erosion of public discourse on none other than the telegraph and the photograph.
Now Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a lot deeper and more nuanced than that. He primarily blames this degradation on television, in particular the news and commercials.
Postman does a very good job of outlining the problems caused by a medium which attempts to convey a variety of information — from the very trivial to the very serious — all on the same platform and with a similar demand for sensationalism, sound bites, and brevity.
As you’ll see in my next two articles (if you choose to go down this particular rabbit hole with me), while Postman made some very worthwhile arguments, he missed some fundamental points.
A Series of Idiosyncratic Events
I recently finished reading a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and I must admit to being in agreement with most of…
