There are books that seem to always be in vogue and conversation. If you are around me for long, for instance, you will hear me talk about Christianity and Liberalism because it was a foundational book when Machen wrote it and continues to be impactful today. In business and leadership circles Jim Collins’ Good to Great is always in conversation. When people speak of cultural engagement and culture shifts, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death gets mentioned regularly.
Postman’s book is a look “public discourse in the age of show business.” In short, he argues that television dramatically changed the cultural landscape of Western civilization. Writing in the early and mid 1980s, Postman recognized the cultural shift that was taking place and warned that culture was tipping away from logic and discourse in favor of amusement, entertainment, and media dominance. Culture shifted from print dominance to television dominance (and now, of course, computer dominance).
Postman shows that this shift did not come all at once, but can be traced throughout history. The printing press worked to move cultures from oral to literary. The telegraph served to connect communities across the continent (and eventually continents), but it also served to destroy real communication. Instead of long reasoned discourse, communication was reduced to headlines and terse comments. When the ability to print graphics was introduced, print media was altered dramatically as pictures were now able to communicate 1000 words. These images, however, shifted America as advertising became less about selling a product based on its merits and more about market research. Television expedited this process and even politics became entertainment.
Postman’s most famous contribution from Amusing Ourselves to Death is his insistence that “The medium is the metaphor.” In other words, much can be made of the message that is being delivered by considering the medium through which it is presented. Even television that intends to be informational focuses first on entertainment through careful camera angles, proper lighting, and concise timing. In politics this is far different from the hours-long debates that candidates participated in as recently 150 years ago.
Contrary to what the quotes below may suggest, Postman was no opposed to television. He seemed to view it as a great source of entertainment. Instead, he was opposed to the way that this entertainment medium had begun to dominate the cultural landscape. Because of the television, all of American culture has become by necessity amusing and entertaining or it has simply fallen by the wayside. Postman’s warning important in our age of technology: “No medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are.”
[bctt tweet=”For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. -Neil Postman” via=”no”]As Christians, we need to wrestle with two primary questions from this book:
- Are we offering life-change or amusement from our pulpits?
- How is our entertainment-driven culture shaping who we are as believers?
Notable Quotes:
- Without a medium to create its form, the news of the day does not exist.
- As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television.
- The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.
- The clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.
- Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now–generally coherent, serious and rational; . . . under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.
- Definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the character of the media of communication through which information is conveyed.
- The fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of information, it dramatically altered what may be called the “information-action ratio.”
- Entertainment is the super-ideology of all discourse on television.
- On television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound, and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence.
- The spectacle we find in true religions has as its purpose enchantment, not entertainment.
- Men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.
- No one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably, and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment.
