Amusing Ourselves to Death. This item is unavailable.Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death has established itself as a key text in cultural and media studies. Television, Postman argues, has taken the place of the printed word at the center of our culture, and in doing so has trivialised the once serious and coherent discussion of all public affairs. Even our political and religious leaders today depend more on camera angles and showmanship than on reason and rhetoric. Postman makes a convincing, often wittily argued, case that we are moving not towards George Orwell's vision of the future but towards Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in which people become addicted to technologies which take away their capacities to think: their critical faculties are destroyed and their sense of history is lost.

From the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity comes a sustained, withering and thought-provoking attack on television and what it is doing to us. Postman's theme is the decline of the printed word and the ascendancy of the "tube" with its tendency to present everythingmurder, mayhem, politics, weatheras entertainment. The ultimate effect, as Postman sees it, is the shrivelling of public discourse as TV degrades our conception of what constitutes news, political debate, art, even religious thought. Early chapters trace America's one-time love affair with the printed word, from colonial pamphlets to the publication of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. There's a biting analysis of TV commercials as a form of "instant therapy" based on the assumption that human problems are easily solvable. Postman goes further than other critics in demonstrating that television represents a hostile attack on literate culture. October 30
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.