Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

What would Postman write regarding the influence of the Internet? The Internet has grown exponentially in the past couple decades. It is now much bigger and full of more information and junk than anything Postman could have imagined it would be like when he wrote "Amusing Ourselves to Death.” He would view the Internet much like he viewed television. According to a biography done on him, “Postman was a humanist, who believed that "new technology can never substitute for human values". Postman would be absolutely dumbfounded…...

Did Neil Postman know something others didn't when he wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, could he see something nobody else could? His once disregarded arguments thought to be irrelevant are now far too relevant. Thirty years ago Postman published his warnings of an American society disillusioned and misinformed by a dependency on media and an abundance of information of which contained no relevance or importance. He warned of a time when media controlled the people, rather than the people controlling the media. Now fast forward…...

In Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death, he goes into extensive detail on how language is used in communication and how it influences people. In chapter two "Media as Epistemology", he discusses how certain information outlets often are the deciding factor for what information is deemed truth and what is labeled as opinion. I found that the determinacy of truth in different societies is measured by someone's choice of medium, their use of appropriate rhetoric, and their ability to…...

Media has always served an important role in American society. At the start of the colonial era, papers were distributed amongst people as a source of information. As mass producing became cheaper newspapers wanted to be the one to sell the most and reach the most amount of people. As a result, their focus shifted to entertaining to the masses. When the radio came into play, people realized it was also a way to reach multiple people at once. It…...