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

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”

Here is Postman’s thesis in a nutshell. The culprit of his thesis is television, and the victim is American culture. The last sentence of this quote provides the title for the book, but it is more than a catchy saying. Postman uses the word “death” to sound the alarm that our culture is in danger of dying—or at the very least, greatly diminishing—by our occupation with amusement in this Age of Show Business.

To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. 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.”

This is the main theme of the book—Television’s Impact on Society. Postman sees this impact as negative only insofar as television has become so pervasive in American society as of the mid-20th century. The problem is not the technology or the medium itself, but rather its coopting of the serious aspects of culture. As a result, culture must conform to the format and purpose of television: entertainment based on images. This is detrimental to our public discourse.

“When Galileo remarked that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he meant it only as a metaphor. Nature itself does not speak. Neither do our minds or our bodies or, more to the point of this book, our bodies politic. Our conversations about nature and about ourselves are conducted in whatever ‘languages’ we find it possible and convenient to employ. We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as ‘it’ is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.”

Here, Postman explains why he uses the word “metaphor” to refer to media rather than “message”—as professor and media critic Marshall McLuhan did. Media are our means of expression—our “languages” through which we express ideas. They create the metaphors that shape how our culture is created. This shaping of culture thus shows the great power that media have to shape our lives.

“And so, I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.”

Given the topic of Postman’s book, it would be easy for critics to dismiss him as an elitist. Several quotes, including this one, seem to anticipate such criticism and dispute it. Postman makes it clear that he’s not trying to abolish television or claim that it is all bad. It brings joy through entertainment; elsewhere, he writes that it has been a boon to people who are housebound. His one and only objection is its taking over the serious parts of our culture and trivializing them.

“We must not be too hasty in mocking Aristotle’s prejudices. We have enough of our own, as for example, the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification. In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. Yet these forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by various peoples. But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers.”

In this quote, Postman attempts to show that how a culture defines truth is shaped by the biases inherent in its forms of expression. This is directly tied to the forms of media available to it. Truth may seem like an objective, immutable concept, but it truly depends on the lens through which it is viewed. This is part of Postman’s theme of the Role of Media in Communication and Epistemology.

“Obviously, my point of view is that the four-hundred-year imperial dominance of typography was of far greater benefit than deficit. Most of our modern ideas about the uses of the intellect were formed by the printed word, as were our ideas about education, knowledge, truth and information. I will try to demonstrate that as typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television takes its place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines. On what benefits may come from other directions, one must keep an open mind.”

All media bring positive and negative aspects, but Postman contends that print was overwhelmingly positive. He establishes this point of view in early chapters. For example, during the Age of Typography, the ideas of the Enlightenment flourished and political theory on which the U.S. Constitution is based was developed. Postman’s argument is that such things happened due to the nature of print as a medium.

“The point all this is leading to is that from its beginning until well into the nineteenth century, America was as dominated by the printed word and an oratory based on the printed word as any society we know of. This situation was only in part a legacy of the Protestant tradition. As Richard Hofstadter reminds us, America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations. ‘The Founding Fathers,’ he writes, ‘were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.’”

This quote points to Postman’s theme of the Golden Age of Typography. The first 100 years of America’s existence as a nation brought ideas and accomplishments that Americans still revere today. The Founding Fathers are held up as unusually capable statesmen, and the nation looks to their political ideas as the continued basis for political theory today. Postman quotes a historian to explain how unique the Founding Fathers were as a group of intellectuals living and working at a time when the medium of print was perfectly attuned to intellectual activity.

“The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of its monopoly. This point cannot be stressed enough, especially for those who are reluctant to acknowledge profound differences in the media environments of then and now. One sometimes hears it said, for example, that there is more printed matter available today than ever before, which is undoubtedly true. But from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was virtually all that was available. There were no movies to see, radio to hear, photographic displays to look at, records to play. There was no television. Public business was channeled into and expressed through print, which became the model, the metaphor and the measure of all discourse.”

This quote reiterates the theme of the Role of Media in Communication and Epistemology. In referring to the history of America during the 19th century, Postman stresses just how much media shapes information and our ways of determining knowledge. He is countering the notion that television may not influence contemporary society that much because it’s just another way to express ideas. His point is that the ideas themselves are altered depending on how they are expressed. When all ideas had to be expressed in print form, they took the form of exposition, whether in writing or in speech. Television, on the other hand, imposes its own form—a lesser one, in Postman’s opinion.

“I choose the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a starting point for this chapter not only because they were the preeminent example of political discourse in the mid-nineteenth century but also because they illustrate the power of typography to control the character of that discourse. Both the speakers and their audience were habituated to a kind of oratory that may be described as literary. For all of the hoopla and socializing surrounding the event, the speakers had little to offer, and audiences little to expect, but language. And the language that was offered was clearly modeled on the style of the written word.”

The Lincoln-Douglas debates are a prime example of a culture based on print. This quote notes that they were based solely on language, yet people flocked to listen to the speakers for hours on end. This is Postman’s evidence of the Golden Age of Typography, a time when print shaped not only the output of ideas but also the way they were received. The main characteristic of this age was exposition—a complex unfolding of ideas based on reason that not every medium is suited for. Print, however, went hand in glove with exposition.

“From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one’s habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the ‘analytic management of knowledge.’ To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another.”

This quote examines print-based exposition. It is this complex way of thinking and expressing ideas that lent itself to 18th-19th-century America. This was the Golden Age of Typography, which Postman believes was degraded by television. He wants readers to know what has been lost in terms of public discourse and, moreover, to realize that television puts the entire culture in danger.

“For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make ‘one neighborhood of the whole country.’ It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse. Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau, who remarked in Walden that ‘We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.’”

Here, Postman turns to the Age of Show Business. The first hint of this new era came when telegraphy divorced information from transportation. Now, information can be sent at lightning speed, accumulating from everywhere around the globe. Thus, information also became divorced from localities, and people would be inundated with information that was not relevant to their daily lives. Information became trivia rather than something people could control or act upon.

“It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television’s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing; that television’s conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase ‘serious television’ is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment. Beyond that, I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.”

Postman argues that television has become so pervasive and integrated into our lives that we take it for granted. When something no longer appears fresh or new, it does not stand out and people forget how it works. Postman wants to pull back the curtain to remind people of television’s effect, to touch on his theme of the Role of Media in Communication and Epistemology. This quote comes at the end of Part 1, with Postman demonstrating how television shapes information and its detriment to public discourse in America.

”In watching American television, one is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s remark on his first seeing the glittering neon signs of Broadway and 42nd Street at night. It must be beautiful, he said, if you cannot read. American television is, indeed, a beautiful spectacle, a visual delight, pouring forth thousands of images on any given day. The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification. Even commercials, which some regard as an annoyance, are exquisitely crafted, always pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music. There is no question but that the best photography in the world is presently seen on television commercials. American television, in other words, is devoted entirely to supplying its audience with entertainment.”

This quote describes how television works in conveying information. In effect, it’s the polar opposite of what Postman describes earlier in the book regarding print and exposition. Everything about television, he notes, is funneled toward the goal of entertaining viewers. This forms the basis for his later arguments about serious aspects of our culture being packaged in an entertaining format, which is incongruous with advanced civilization. The quote is also a prime example of Postman’s writing style, as he draws from diverse sources as evidence.

“Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore—and this is the critical point—how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. As typography once dictated the style of conducting politics, religion, business, education, law and other important social matters, television now takes command. In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials. For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

This is a significant point in Postman’s theme of Television’s Impact on Society. Just as the audience at the Lincoln-Douglas debates was shaped by the medium of print, television’s audience is likewise shaped by it. This audience comes to expect life to be presented in the same form as television. Entertainment and trivial aspects are pushed as the goals of all discourse.

“I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.”

Postman describes the effect of the ubiquitous words “now . . . this” in television news. He argues it does great harm by taking all news stories out of context and presenting them sequentially with no connection to each other. This format is especially harmful to young people who see a news story of something disturbing and shocking followed by a feel-good, innocuous story. It teaches them to respond in an unnatural way to negative events, thinking that everything gets smoothed over. This quote shows what Postman thinks of such a message from television, referring to various ways of describing a major disconnect from reality.

“To press reports of White House dissembling, the public has replied with Queen Victoria’s famous line: ‘We are not amused.’ However, here the words mean something the Queen did not have in mind. They mean that what is not amusing does not compel their attention. Perhaps if the President’s lies could be demonstrated by pictures and accompanied by music the public would raise a curious eyebrow. If a movie, like All the President’s Men, could be made from his misleading accounts of government policy, if there were a break-in of some sort or sinister characters laundering money, attention would quite likely be paid. We do well to remember that President Nixon did not begin to come undone until his lies were given a theatrical setting at the Watergate hearings. But we do not have anything like that here. Apparently, all President Reagan does is say things that are not entirely true. And there is nothing entertaining in that.”

In this quote, Postman gives an example of television’s impact on politics. He explains that early in Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president, his verbal gaffes and contradictions were causes of concern to both the White House staff and newscasters, who reported on them. Then, as the years and gaffes went on, both parties lost interest. The reason, Postman explains, is that the general public lost interest: Reagan’s mistakes were no longer entertaining. Thus, reporting stopped. Postman argues television removed something important that then impacted public policy. Politics fell by the wayside simply because they weren’t exciting enough.

“Most Americans, including preachers, have difficulty accepting the truth, if they think about it at all, that not all forms of discourse can be converted from one medium to another. It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not.”

Postman uses this comparison of translations to illustrate the idea that different media have different effects on ideas and information. Different media fundamentally change something about discourse. This is part of Postman’s larger argument that television is lacking something that print has.

“Though it may be un-American to say it, not everything is televisible. Or to put it more precisely, what is televised is transformed from what it was to something else, which may or may not preserve its former essence. For the most part, television preachers have not seriously addressed this matter. They have assumed that what had formerly been done in a church or a tent, and face-to-face, can be done on television without loss of meaning, without changing the quality of the religious experience. Perhaps their failure to address the translation issue has its origin in the hubris engendered by the dazzling number of people to whom television gives them access.”

Here, Postman applies the idea of different media changing a message to religion. He claims that religious programs on television substantially alter the content and thus, the meaning of a religious experience. He also points out religious leaders’ assumption that the experience will be the same. This underscores Postman’s point that for the most part, people are unaware of television’s influence on society and themselves. He addresses this in the final chapter by calling for more education to increase awareness.

“It is a sobering thought to recall that there are no photographs of Abraham Lincoln smiling, that his wife was in all likelihood a psychopath, and that he was subject to lengthy fits of depression. He would hardly have been well suited for image politics. We do not want our mirrors to be so dark and so far from amusing. What I am saying is that just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work, image politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason.”

In this quote, Postman points out an inconvenient truth about television, claiming that Abraham Lincoln was not suited to it and thus might not have become president if television were the prevailing medium at the time. This is all the more disconcerting in light of the fact that Lincoln is widely considered among the best—if not the best—presidents the United States has had. Television “dumbs down” everything and, in doing so, removes important content, making everything about soothing the psychology of the viewer. The unique characteristics of Lincoln and his wife would not have played well to an audience, with Postman saying that the nation loses out in such instances.

“The fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue which was largely won in the twentieth. What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.”

This quote ties television directly to the Huxleyan vision portrayed in Brave New World. Censorship, which George Orwell warned about, is not the threat. Instead, the floodgates have been opened to nonstop information on television, an entertaining format. Postman’s fear is that the very same thing that happened in Aldous Huxley’s novel will also take place in America: People will simply lose interest in anything substantial or serious, which is necessary for sustaining an advanced culture.

“Yet ‘Sesame Street’ and its progeny, ‘The Electric Company,’ are not to be blamed for laughing the traditional classroom out of existence. If the classroom now begins to seem a stale and flat environment for learning, the inventors of television itself are to blame, not the Children’s Television Workshop. We can hardly expect those who want to make good television shows to concern themselves with what the classroom is for. They are concerned with what television is for. This does not mean that ‘Sesame Street’ is not educational. It is, in fact, nothing but educational—in the sense that every television show is educational. Just as reading a book—any kind of book—promotes a particular orientation toward learning, watching a television show does the same. ‘The Little House on the Prairie,’ ‘Cheers’ and ‘The Tonight Show’ are as effective as ‘Sesame Street’ in promoting what might be called the television style of learning. And this style of learning is, by its nature, hostile to what has been called book-learning or its hand-maiden, school-learning. If we are to blame ‘Sesame Street’ for anything, it is for the pretense that it is any ally of the classroom. That, after all, has been its chief claim on foundation and public money. As a television show, and a good one, ‘Sesame Street’ does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.”

Despite its claim of being educational programming, the show Sesame Street gets poor marks from Postman. He doesn’t criticize it as far as television shows go, but does so because it’s a television show. Here, his theme of the Role of Media in Communication and Epistemology is illustrated. The main point being made is not what Sesame Street tries to convey but rather how it does so. The medium defines the content, thus teaching children the one goal of television—to enjoy television. For Postman, there’s no connection to school whatsoever.

“‘The Voyage of the Mimi,’ in other words, spent $3.65 million for the purpose of using media in exactly the manner that media merchants want them to be used—mindlessly and invisibly, as if media themselves have no epistemological or political agenda. And, in the end, what will the students have learned? They will, to be sure, have learned something about whales, perhaps about navigation and map reading, most of which they could have learned just as well by other means. Mainly, they will have learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment, and ought to. And they will not rebel if their English teacher asks them to learn the eight parts of speech through the medium of rock music. Or if their social studies teacher sings to them the facts about the War of 1812. Or if their physics comes to them on cookies and T-shirts. Indeed, they will expect it and thus will be well prepared to receive their politics, their religion, their news and their commerce in the same delightful way.”

Education is one important area of society influenced by television’s bias toward entertainment. This quote refers to “The Voyage of the Mimi”, a multimedia science curriculum centered on a dramatization broadcast on television. Postman examines it at length in Chapter 10, and his skepticism comes through in this quote. The quote implies that education in the form of entertainment prepares students to graduate into a world in which every other aspect of society is also pleasingly offered as amusement.

“What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

This is what Postman has been building toward throughout the book. Part 1 sets the stage by explaining how media work and describing the previous print-dominated era. All of Part 2 is dedicated to the theme of Television’s Impact on Society, as Postman breaks down the impact into several crucial areas of public discourse. In the final chapter, he returns to the Huxley versus Orwell framework he set up in the Foreword. Television has ultimately created a Huxleyan scenario, and Postman minces no words about its possible damage to American culture.