Thanks, Neil, for amusing us with “Amusing Ourselves to Death”

Call it cultural criticism, media commentary, technology prognostication, political discourse, and television philosophy*, but whatever you call it, Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” is a highly readable and entertaining classic.

Originally published in 1985, it’s as salient, topical, apropos as it was almost 4 decades ago when it was released. It was written a 5 short years after the founding of CNN and cable news at large — and a good decade prior to Fox News pushing the envelope of news as entertainment even further. The things this man foreshadowed!

The fascinating part is just how translatable and analogous his thoughts are on how technology inherently drives particular behavior simply by its structural design.

Fundamentally, for this series of questions, you could easily substitute the word “television” with “social media”, “generative artificial intelligence”, “sandbox/open world games”, “massively multi-player roleplaying games (MMORPG)”, “virtual/augmented reality” and any other medium where information is delivered (or created, in the case of generative AI) either mono- or bi-directionally for communication or entertainment purposes.

The question: “What is television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce?”

And he goes on to draw “a distinction between technology and medium” in such a fashion: “We might say that a technology is to a medium as a brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put.”

Here’s the real crux that follows the structural delineation above:
“Of course, like the brain itself, every technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.”

As we contemplate, implement and regulate each new technological feat — new ones arising at an exponential pace and each in turn exponentially growing — we must definitely bear in md the sentiment that no technology is neutral, as its inherent biases make manifest positions, opinions, cultures, and beyond.

Go read the book. It’s a pleasure to read, with Postman’s humor throughout mitigating any occasional tedium of the like common in intellectual publications.

This is what ChatGPT Plus “calls it”, for what it’s worth:

The book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is categorized under the following genres or book categories:

Non-fiction: “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is a work of non-fiction that explores the impact of mass media and the decline of public discourse in the age of television.

Cultural Criticism: The book critically examines the influence of television and its effects on society, politics, and culture, making it fall within the category of cultural criticism.

Media Studies: As the book delves into the role of media and its effects on society, it can also be classified under media studies, which encompasses the analysis of media systems and their impact.

Social Commentary: “Amusing Ourselves to Death” offers a commentary on the state of modern society, focusing on the impact of entertainment culture, making it fall under the category of social commentary.

Communications: Given its exploration of the communication landscape and the impact of different media forms, the book can also be considered a work within the field of communications.

These categories may vary slightly depending on the specific edition or publisher, but generally, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is found in these areas of literature and academia.