Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death

Neil postman was a jack of all trades, he was an American Author, an educator at New York University, media theorist, and cultural critic. (PressThink 1) In 1985 Neil Postman published a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourage in the Age of show Business. The book provides a look at what happens when politics, journalism, education and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment. In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman says that the content of a culture is contained in its communication, and that the content of communication is affected by the medium of communication. In other words, Postman is saying that a culture is defined by its connection of people, and the connection of people is afflicted by technology. Sherry Turkle is another author that has written a book called Alone Together published in January 2011. Sherry Turkle is an award winning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she focuses her research on human technology interaction. Alone Together is the results of Turkle’s nearly fifteen year exploration of our lives with technology, she describes new unsettling relationships between friends, family, parents and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community. There is a third author named Julia Angwin that has developed a book that connects with Postman’s argument. Julia Angwin is an award winning investigative journalist at a news organization called ProPublica. (About)

Part one is concerned mostly with background and historical analysis. In Chapter one, "The Medium is the Metaphor," Postman introduces the concept of the media-metaphor. He suggests that an oral culture will speak of the world differently than one that has printed language. It is all an introduction for his basic examination, which aims to show how the television age is undergoing a rapid transformation in the wake of the relatively new media of television. In Chapter two, "Media as Epistemology," Postman examines how any civilization's media will determine the way in which it defines truth.

Postman, the author of “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, discusses how the television has negatively affected discourse in America. He uses examples and historical research to make a claim of how it is effecting discourse. The chapter we are looking into does not relate to the television but rather the newspaper. His central claim of chapter four revolves around the newspaper. He talks about the effect on society and the

Humor most definitely is an instinct that evolved to serve some purpose in everyone’s lives. There is a meaning The story, What Makes Us Laugh by Leon Rappoport thoroughly analyzes the different theories in people’s reactions of humor. Rappoport discusses how certain jokes succeed and fail, why we laugh when we don’t think we should, and why sometimes we might not react to humor. I found this part quite interesting when he was saying certain people react with either boredom or fascination, with boredom being more prevalent. Personally, I would be captivated in this analysis of theories because not only is it interesting, but it also teaches one further about humor than one would not expect, especially the theory of superiority.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman uses an abundant amount of logos to argue his claim. The more that is read, the more difficult it is to dismiss his information. This is because of the consistent use of evidence presented in the form of logos. The entire book is incorporated with facts, statistics, dates, and general logical arguments. In chapter six, Postman stresses how television does not allow for the processing of thoughts. He states, “I should like to illustrate this point by offering the case of the eighty-minute discussion provided by the ABC network on November 20, 1983, following its controversial movie The Day After” (88). The discussion was broadcasted on television with intentions to have valued informational content, but failed miserably according to Postman. He argued this in a logical manner. The discussion lacked deep conversation and the speakers spoke in generalities, as the show did not allow an adequate amount of time. This is a great use of logos because it

In society there are still differences in classes such as higher class, middle class, and lower class. In sociology, we observed a film called The Pursuit Happyness, where we witnessed the struggles a father went through to succeed. Chris Gardner, who was played by Will Smith, is living in his apartment with his wife and his son. Due to their struggles, the mother walks out on and leaves Chris struggling alone with his son. In the film Chris Gardner applies for an unpaid internship for a competitive stockbroker company where out of twenty men, only one gets the job. While he is on his internship, we see the hardships of getting kicked out of his apartment to staying at a shelter home to then sleeping in a subway bathroom with his son. Viewing the movie through a sociological lens, The Pursuit of Happyness will be analyzed according to the major three sociological paradigms: structural functionalism, social conflict theory, and symbolic interactionalism.

    The form of communication created by the television is not only a part of how our modern society communicates, but is has changed public discourse to the point that it has completely redefined it, argued Neil Postman in his convincing book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He viewed this as very harmful, and additionally so because our society is ignorant of it as they quickly becomes engulfed in its epistemology. When faced with the question about whether the television shapes or reflects culture, Postman pointed out that it is no longer applicable because "television has gradually become our culture" (79). What kind of culture is this? Postman warned that it is one in which we

In the second part of Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the author examines the medium of education in order to exhibit how it has affected and fashioned modern public discourse. Postman uses a two-part argument on the topic of the influence that television has over education. In order to properly demonstrate the authors view and evidence on this subject of discourse, as well as my own, I will explore how television presents education as well as how exactly television has managed to alter education when it is faced outside of television.

Postman uses an example of Aldous Huxley to demonstrate that our society has been molded into one where the people are too distracted by the media to examine their lives closer and understand that they are virtually powerless. "Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us"(2nd page of Foreword). We, as a society, love television. We watch it when we are bored, when we are tired, and even keep it on when conversations are being had as background noise. Needless to say we love it. Postman uses this quote to show that television, something that we love, is distracting

Postman goes deep into television and its damaging effects on our culture. Postman says that when watching Television for entertainment only no harm is done, but when it tries to inform us that is when it can get dangerous. He goes into the history of technology and how it affected the past. His main focus throughout the book is that the media shapes our culture directly. We tend not to see just how media does this; we just keep thinking that everything that happens on TV is ?ok? and ?normal?

In the book ”Amusing ourselves to death” Neil Postman is making an argument about the fact that humans could amuse themselves to death in their lives.Even if when we think of death we think at something terrible,in his book this particular term is asociated with ”amusament” which is a quite unusual asociation of terms.At the beggining of the book the author is making a paralel between Orwell and Huxley.What is quite known about these two is the fact that their ideas were different and the book ”Amusing ourselves to death” states this ideas.What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book,for there whould be no one who would want to read one.Orwell feared those who would deprive

Jenkins talks about how the consumption of media products is a collective process, in other words, the collective intelligence is seen as an alternative source of media power. He describes how within popular culture, the collective meaning making is shaping and changing the ways religion, education, laws, politics, advertising and how the military operate (4). Jenkins discusses a process called “convergence of modes”, he explains that media and communication are becoming interconnected like the telephone and television.

Neil Postman is deeply worried about what technology can do to a culture or, more importantly, what technology can undo in a culture.  In the case of television, Postman believes that, by happily surrendering ourselves to it, Americans are losing the ability to conduct and participate in meaningful, rational public discourse and public affairs.  Or, to put it another way, TV is undoing public discourse and, as the title of his book Amusing Ourselves to Death suggests, we are willing accomplices.

Throughout the years, types of media have gradually changed. One of the most recent changes taking place in the second half of the twentieth century. In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman talks about the change from the age of typography to the age of visual media and how it has greatly impacted the American culture. Postman points out several reasons to support his opinion that the transition has indeed proven to have a negative effect on the American people.

Media influence is the force by which ideas are injected into people’s lives shaping the very culture of society. This influence is masqueraded through hidden media message, resulting in a change in its audience which can be positive or negative, abrupt or gradual, short term or long term. Although mass media’s influential effect can reach a wide ranged audience as an agent of socialization the responsibility to contain what it releases has not been of importance. “The media’s socially significant obligations are formally ignored.” (A.S. Zapesotskii, 2011, p 9). Media messages can be exerted through many different outlets such as TV shows, music, movies, commercials, news, magazines, games which are all gravitated to entertain audiences ultimately offering personal gratification that can sometimes blur the lines between reality and