Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Neil Postman, 1985)
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.
Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became the context for news.
Everything became everyone’s business.
For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.
We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence.
It may be of some interest to note, in this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use.
The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930’s and 1940’s and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful “Trivial Pursuit.” In one form or another, each of these supplies an answer to the question, “What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?” And in one form or another, the, answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game?
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.
In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do. Television educates by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them.
And that is as precisely remote from what a classroom requires of them as reading a book is from watching a stage show.
For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring.
Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives?
Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing? But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable.
To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.
Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution.
- Without a vote.
- Without polemics.
- Without guerrilla resistance.
Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence.
All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress.
And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.
Thus, a central thesis of computer technology—that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data—will go unexamined.
Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.