Amusing Ourselves to Death
by Neil Postman
I highly recommend that everyone concerned with the state of our national discourse read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.
The book was published in 1985 so it doesn’t include any discussion of the impact of social media on public discourse. However, the points Postman makes are easily applied to those platforms.
The basic premise is that technology makes us intellectually lazy. It influences how we communicate and we expend less mental energy in processing information.
Postman traces the evolution of our modes of communication. When leaders had to rely on in-person speeches and written essays or opinion pieces, they had more time or room to explain their points. Understanding required people to listen or read thoughtfully. People were used to taking the time to reflect on what was being said.
When television came along, communication became more visual and entertaining. Substance started taking a back seat to style. Communicating became more about capturing viewers. Advertisers played a big part in all of this. Media outlets need advertising revenue to stay viable so they generate the kind of content that will attract the people the advertisers want to reach. Consciously or unconsciously we’ve come to expect a degree of entertainment with our news. It’s a cycle that requires an ever larger entertainment component – style over substance.
Technology also leads to shorter messages. The average length of a story on TV news is 30 seconds. An ‘in-depth’ story might run two minutes. Clearly there’s no time or room for nuance. An example is the origins of modern day Israel that underpin the ongoing wars in the region. Not understanding those events makes it easier to see the conflicts as ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ rather than complicated and morally challenging.
The advent of the 24/7 news cycle created the need for content. Things that would have been considered too trivial before became newsworthy. Examples include the New York Times The Morning newsletter’s regular feature highlighting what the late-night talk show hosts are saying. Or stories about the Cannes Film Festival’s dress code or who-wore-what at the Met Gala. As Postman points out:
“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 [or school yard taunts and bragging], when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself a risk. . . .”
According to the Pew Research Center, 54% of U.S. adults get news from social media at least some of the time. Distorted information and amplified rumors covertly perpetuate ideological messages. #Pizzagate and Haitian immigrants eating cats are examples. As Postman says:
“Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than [other] changes . . . Introduce speed-of-light transmission . . . and you make a cultural revolution. . . Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence.”