Amusing Ourselves to Death: The 1985 Book That Saw Our Digital Future Coming

Some books are products of their time. Others somehow become more relevant as time passes. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, originally published in 1985, belongs firmly in the second category. I expected a book primarily about television and the decline of serious public discourse. What I found was something much more significant: a book about how the medium through which we receive information changes the way we think, what we value, and ultimately how we understand reality. Forty years after its publication, that argument feels remarkably prescient.

Postman’s central argument is relatively simple: the medium is not merely a neutral container for information. The medium shapes the message. Television, he argues, had transformed American public discourse by making entertainment the standard by which virtually everything was judged. News, politics, education, and even religion increasingly had to compete for attention according to the rules of television. Serious ideas had to become visually interesting, brief, emotionally compelling, and entertaining.

That argument is what makes this book so remarkable today.

Postman was writing about television, but we now live in a world where his concerns have been amplified enormously. Television required us to sit down and watch whatever was being broadcast. Today’s smartphone puts an essentially unlimited stream of entertainment, information, outrage, advertising, and distraction in our pockets. Social media has taken Postman’s “Age of Show Business” and turned it into an Age of Constant Scrolling. Recent commentary on the book has made precisely this connection, noting that the problem Postman identified with television has become even more pronounced with social media and algorithmically driven feeds. 

And that is why the book feels almost prophetic.

Postman asks us to consider what happens when entertainment becomes the organizing principle of public life. What happens when the news has to entertain us? What happens when politicians are evaluated more by their ability to perform than by their ability to reason? What happens when religious messages have to compete with everything else on the screen? What happens when education is expected to be entertaining before it is expected to be intellectually demanding?

Those questions are arguably even more relevant now than when Postman wrote them. Social media rewards outrage, novelty, humor, emotional reactions, and easily digestible content. A complicated argument rarely performs as well as a provocative statement. A thoughtful explanation competes against a fifteen-second video. A nuanced position is less likely to spread than something that can be reduced to a headline, meme, or sound bite.

Postman’s discussion of news may be the part that feels most immediately recognizable. He describes a world in which unrelated pieces of information are presented one after another, with little connection between them. The familiar television transition from one story to another creates what he calls a “Now…this” style of discourse. Something tragic can be followed almost immediately by something frivolous, with the medium treating both as interchangeable pieces of content.

Scroll through a social-media feed today and it is difficult not to see exactly what he was talking about.

A war. A political scandal. A funny video. A celebrity’s vacation. A friend’s family photo. A devastating natural disaster. An advertisement. A joke. Another political argument.

Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.

The problem isn’t necessarily that any individual piece of information is false. The deeper problem is that the medium can make everything feel equally significant—or equally insignificant.

That is one of the book’s greatest insights: an information-saturated culture is not necessarily an informed culture. We can know about everything and understand very little. We can receive an endless stream of information without having the context, time, attention, or wisdom necessary to turn that information into knowledge. Postman’s critique of the telegraph and television anticipates this problem remarkably well: information detached from context can become entertainment rather than something that leads to understanding or action.

I also appreciated that Postman doesn’t simply argue that television is “bad.” His argument is considerably more sophisticated. He is asking us to recognize that every technology has biases. Different forms of communication encourage different ways of thinking. Print encourages sustained attention, exposition, abstraction, and logical development. Television privileges images, immediacy, brevity, and entertainment. The important question, then, isn’t merely whether we use technology but what kinds of minds and cultures our technologies are producing.

That is a question I found myself thinking about long after finishing the book.

Perhaps the most memorable part of Postman’s argument is his comparison of George Orwell’s 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell feared that we would be deprived of information and freedom by an oppressive government. Huxley feared something different: that we would become so enamored with pleasure and distraction that we would no longer care about truth. Postman believes the Huxleyan vision is the more relevant danger.

That distinction feels especially important today.

We spend enormous amounts of time worrying about censorship, misinformation, propaganda, and manipulation—and those concerns are legitimate. But Postman forces us to consider another possibility: what if the greatest threat isn’t that someone prevents us from thinking, but that we become so distracted that we don’t want to think?

That question alone makes this book worth reading.

There are certainly aspects of Postman’s argument that I would qualify. His idealization of print culture can feel overly nostalgic, and some of his historical comparisons are more convincing than others. But those limitations don’t diminish the central insight. If anything, they make the book more interesting. I don’t have to agree with every part of Postman’s analysis to recognize that he identified something extraordinarily important.

Our tools don’t simply help us communicate. They teach us how to communicate.

And once we understand that, we can begin to make better decisions about how we use them.

I finished Amusing Ourselves to Death with a greater desire to read things that require sustained attention, to seek out context rather than isolated information, and to be more suspicious of anything that demands an immediate emotional reaction. The book made me think about how often I consume information simply because it is available rather than because it is useful.

That is an impressive accomplishment for a book written about television in 1985.

Ultimately, I give Amusing Ourselves to Death five stars because Postman isn’t merely making an argument about an outdated technology. He is giving us a framework for understanding our relationship with media itself. Television was his case study. The underlying problem is much broader.

Today the screen is smaller, the content is faster, the algorithms are more sophisticated, and the distractions are essentially endless. But Postman’s fundamental question remains:

What happens to a culture when entertainment becomes its dominant way of understanding the world?

Forty years later, I think we are living with the answer.

And that makes Amusing Ourselves to Death not only a great book, but an extraordinarily important one.

WRITTEN BY

David L. Burton

For more information, visit the Engaged Neighbor website. Take our pledge and become part of a movement! Or subscribe to our newsletter. Access some of the research documents written by David Burton, the author of this blog. Or better yet, purchase one of his books off Amazon. Contact David L. Burton via email at dburton541@yahoo.