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

Neil Postman (1931-2003) was a media critic and professor of education and communication at New York University for over 40 years. He earned a master’s degree in 1955 and a doctorate in education 1958, both from Columbia University. While he began his career with a focus on education, he became best known for his work on media studies. Postman is the author of 20 books and countless articles, most of which are related to education, technology, or language—and often all three. At New York University, he founded the graduate program in media ecology, which studies media as an environment that impacts everything people do and perceive.

Postman’s knowledge and expertise on the subject of media make him highly qualified to write the book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Perhaps his most famous book, it was written in 1985, but Postman had been studying the topic of television’s influence on society for more than two decades, at least since his earlier book Television and the Teaching of English (1961). He also wrote The Disappearance of Childhood (1982), in which he argued that the printing press had largely “created” childhood, at least as a social construct. Because television offers more direct access to information through simple images rather than complex words and thought, the line between childhood and adulthood became blurred in the 20th century. Children thus lose out on a certain innocence no longer available to them. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman expands on this line of thinking to show how television has pervaded (and degraded) all public discourse in America—including news, religion, politics, and education.

Postman continues his examination of technology’s impact on society in a later book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992). Here, he expands his focus from television to all technology and their dominance over all aspects of American life. Similarly to what he writes in the final chapter of Amusing Ourselves to Death, he laments society’s unquestioned acceptance of technology and calls for greater education about technology as a way to scrutinize its effects. This appears to be an uphill battle, as the unquestioned acceptance of technology is also a theme in his book The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995). Unlike others who called for a return to earlier times or strict limits on technological tools like television and computers, Postman accepts that they are here to stay—and even have value in certain respects. His main point is that people need to raise their awareness of such technology, attempt to understand it better, and make choices about it with a more critical eye.