Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
I seem to have had a somewhat intermittent relationship with television over the years, at least compared to most people. I'm sure I spent the average daily hourage glued to the box when growing up, then left home in 1984 to take a fine art degree. Excepting a few months of temporary residence at my dad's house, I didn't have a telly until about 1993 because I couldn't afford one and didn't really miss it. The irony here is that my fine art degree was one specialising in time based media, specifically film, video, and television.

We were trying to make video art. One of the pieces which had the most lasting effect on me was by Brendan Mooney, a fellow student who ended up playing rhythm guitar for Dave Vanian's Phantom Chords. I don't recall what it was called, but the video was shot in an empty studio with a stationary camera pointed at the wall. Every few minutes, Brendan would appear, peering at us cautiously from one side of the screen or another as though hoping we wouldn't see him, and each time he appeared, an uproarious laugh track filled the room despite that nothing funny was happening. After a few minutes of this, it became difficult to watch without laughing at the absurdity of it, and after another minute or so the obvious means by which the viewer was being manipulated left us feeling quite uncomfortable; and while it's not true that I've been entirely unable to watch sitcoms ever since, they have to be funny. Some guy pulling a face and saying now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout no longer cuts it for me, regardless of canned laughter.

Not all television is a waste of time, but the great majority of it is, and I no longer have the patience to sit in front of the box for an entire evening. Amusing Ourselves to Death is one of those books which sort of explains why everything is terrible, and has therefore come as a massive revelation because now I understand exactly why I've had this difficult relationship with the goggle box, and also because it's nice to know that I'm not crazy and that it isn't just me.

Postman expands on McLuhan to some degree, although he draws a more ominous conclusion. The central thesis of his argument is simple, namely that we have gone from being a text based culture to a visual one, and that because different media tend to dictate what can be said, this has profoundly influenced our way of thinking; and because visual media tend to reduce complex narratives to easily digested aesthetics, we are now living in a post-truth world where people who think they're vampires can actually be vampires and a game show host can occupy the White House; and should you happen to mention any of this on social media, someone will inevitably bleat about how there are some really good documentaries on television these days, which more or less proves the point.

We've spent a lot of time congratulating ourselves at having avoided the totalitarian future described by George Orwell's 1984. Postman argues that we've actually ended up with something much closer to Huxley's Brave New World wherein the problem is not that books are banned or routinely burned, but that we've ceased to care about books and, by association, truth, because we're too busy being entertained. Of course, as with any argument on this sort of scale, there's a lot of wiggle room - although it seems telling that everything stated back in 1985 applies equally well to the internet and other more recently developed media, and so much so as to require no great extension of the argument - and this is what those few Goodreads reviewers to take issue with this book have picked up on, usually in terms which may as well be how there are some really good documentaries on television these days.

Everybody needs to read this book, and if you believe those who tell you that they don't watch television do so in order to appear superior, then you're almost certainly a massive fucking tool and you really, really, really, really need to read this book.