Amusing Ourselves To Death Neil Postman

In an effort to expose the epistemology of television, which Postman believes has not been effectively addressed, he examines the effects of TV on several important American cultural institutions: news, religion, politics and education.  All four institutions, Postman argues, have realized that they have to go on television in order to be noticed which, in turn, requires them to learn the language of TV if they are to reach the people.  Therefore, they have joined the national conversation not on their own terms, but on TV's terms.  Postman contends that this transformation of our major institutions has trivialized what is most important about them and turned our culture into "one vast arena for show business" (80).  In the case of broadcast news, we see visually stimulating, disconnected stories about murder and mayhem along with a healthy dose of infotainment delivered by friendly and likeable anchors that remind us to "tune in tomorrow".  In the case of politics, we have discourse through distorted paid TV commercials and "debates" in which the appearance of having said something important is

I don’t think the specific knowledge a student needs to succeed in school can be defined. It all depends on what you want to learn, what you find interesting, or simply whatever knowledge you may need to get a degree. In Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he devotes a whole chapter to epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Do you ever dread going to those long lecture classes or those classes where you strictly read or write?

“The whole problem with news on television comes down to this all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on one page of a newspaper”. The average news cast is only twenty-two minutes long,and that's not nearly enough time to cover the days events.In Neil Postman’s essay “The News” Postman talks about the structure,content,and goals and results of a television news cast. The news can be compared to the theatres in terms of its structure. According to Postman, “Music takes us immediately into the realm of the symbolic, a world that is not to be taken literally.”

I disagree with the news being somewhat based on entertainment. I feel that the news should show stories based on importance not entertainment value.

Growing up as a child, my mom made a habit out of watching the morning news no matter what was taking place in the country. Whether my mom watched the news for entertainment or to see what was significant to her has been left unanswered. Correspondingly, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that the news today is entertainment and irrelevant to the people who obtain it. Not to mention Postman’s character, Henry David Thoreau gives an example of Postman’s debate stating, “Perchance the first news that will leak into the flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” To validate Postman's argument, I watched a 30-minute news segment from News 7, on January 25th, 2017. The section stated that a birth certificate found in the debris left by a tornado that battered Petal, MS on January 21st, 2017. Also, after reviewing several news segments, I found Postman’s theory to be accurate.

After the age of print culture, a new era consisting of the telegraph and photograph was integrated into the American lifestyle. The telegraph allowed for news from all over to be rapidly spread in great quantities all across the nation. It combined each state into one single community that could only relate to current and brief facts about one another. This abundance of information lead to relevance, impotence, and incoherent throughout the country. This news is often referred to by Postman as the news of the day because it was gone by the next, only to be filled by more unnecessary news, "It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse" (Postman 65). The telegraph focused on pointless

According to him “First, ‘news’ is generally considered to be something especially unusual…. Second, news outlets are influenced by their consumers. Human beings are especially interested in events that might affect them personally.” ( Phillips, 2015) If we take this explanation to define news, then indeed the media is just to pay more attention to the Paris shooting than those in Beirut. However, does this mean that matters that is not unusual, and perhaps not as personal, not important or newsworthy? There certainly is some truth to the argument, for example, people love to be entertained and, therefore, most might be more prone to read about Kylie Jenner’s new hairstyle then a “boring” bill being passed. I do not think, however, that makes it more newsworthy then the new policy taking

From the beginning of community living, people have wanted to know what is happening amongst each other. Beginning with word of mouth all the way up to Facebook stories, the goal of sharing news is to allow others to know what is happening in the world. News is generally considered to have these 8 characteristics: immediacy, proximity, prominence, oddity, conflict, suspense, emotions, and consequence. The evolution of news has always been derived from becoming faster, easier to access, and more interesting. A movie that satirically covers this evolution is Anchorman 2. The movie makes the joke that there was a point in which the reporters asked “Why do we have to tell the people what they need to here? Why can’t we just tell them what they

Based on one’s beliefs, news can have many different definitions. When determining how news is published, editors take four factors into consideration; Universal News Drivers, Editorial and Audience Judgment, and “Bad” News. When determining which factors apply to articles, one may examine the characteristics of these articles and then make an informed decision about which concepts apply and why. On October 15th I visited the newseum.org website and examined the front pages from three separate newspaper’s. All of the different front pages featured different headlines. The stories from these headlines featured information that I could use to apply the previously mentioned concepts.

According to media critic Neil Postman, television has achieved such dominance as to dictate the form in which news comes, and it also dictates how we respond to it. In delivering news as vaudeville, television causes other media to follow suit, so that all information begins to resemble television.

I completely agree with Peter Funk on his take on how our globalized society nowadays prioritizes their intake on news. I work at HEB where we not only sell groceries but magazines and newspapers. I will probably get either one or two customers a week that buy newspapers and even then, they are not anywhere near young. I have seen that our society now depends on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media outlets to gain information about the world around us. I, myself can say that I am guilty of this offense as I do not read the newspaper, read online news, nor watch my local news on television. The author's closing sentence was a beautiful one, as it left the reader wondering where they stand in today's world. Being in the dark or

 Information  was  bought  and  sold  irrespective  of  its  use  or  meaning,     1   and   this   is   how   the   value   of   news   has   come   to   rely   on   its   novelty,   interest   and   curiosity  and  not  on  its  functionality  (Postman,  1986).       “Television   speaks   in   only   one   persistent   voice   –   the   voice   of   entertainment,”   (Postman,  1986).

The topic of the first chapter is about newspaper and their history throughout America. Among the many facts stated in the chapter, Wattenberg states that the popularity of newspapers has been dwindling. To drive this point even further he goes about telling a time where President George Bush Jr. remarked he did not read the newspaper and later tried offset the controversy by saying he received his information by way of daily briefings (Wattenberg 9). As the chapter continues tables and others statistics are shown with a mass decrease in newspapers subscriptions and how the industry as whole represents an interests in American politic or critical events among Americans. He then brings up that surveys which indicate young adults do read, just not (Wattenberg 24) He concludes with saying newspapers ' decrease in popularity in indicative of young people apathy towards day to day events.

What is contrasting, however, is the fact that the second news story on Ten Eyewitness is a story focused on sports. The story is about the fight between Queensland and Victoria to host the next NRL Grand Final. Boyd et al (2008, p 151) indicates that while the usual practice is to separate sports news, exceptions can lie in specialty stories such as the one mentioned above. ‘When is sports news, news news?’ (Boyd, et al 2008). Although this is not a simply a sports story, it is interesting to note that Ten must consider it to be far more newsworthy than the ABC did (with the package airing third to last).

What was astonishing was not the rapidity of the news- that is, after all, the beauty of modern broadcasting technology- but the effect that the news had on the public. In the following weeks and months, story after story demonstrated the