Amusing Ourselves To Death Chapter Summary

Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman is written based on Postman’s opinion that television has impacted the level of public discourse in America in a negative way. Postman begins the story by talking about two significant books: 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In this book, Postman plans to talk about how things in the world, inspired by television, have proved that our world is turning into the one he’s read about in the stories stated above.

In the first chapter, Postman talks about different cities that have been the focal point of a radiating American spirit. He says that Boston, New York, and Chicago have been previous cities- but now it is Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a city devoted to entertainment and now everything in life (politics, religion, sports, news, and education) has been changed with more show-business aspects. I think he is saying that now, society will think something is irrelevant if it is not entertaining. We now have a culture based solely on entertainment. Postman states that “all culture is a conversation, or more precisely, a corporation of conversations, conducted in a variety of symbolic modes.” This quote is where Postman begins to talk about content and form. There’s many different forms to share

content, but we are more likely to pay attention to the form that is most entertaining.
Chapter two was a much easier read that chapter one.

It’s titled “Media as Epistemology.” Epistemology is basically the theory of knowledge, or how do you know what you know? In this chapter, Postman talks about how media can influence and determine the definition of truth. He argues that the definition of truth is derived from the character of the media. Information is conveyed in different ways, so the definition of truth can be twisted. Serious forms of discussion have turned into entertainment, concerning Postman because television has influenced the way we live. I found it interesting to read about the different kinds of media and how written words can express something different than oral words and

such.
In chapters three and four, Postman mentions some of the major changes that occurred in America with the introduction of the printing press. He describes the society as being quite literate and interested in the written word, because there were no other forms of media at the time. Print was the only outlet for thought, influencing the way people expressed themselves. Chapter four talks about the typographic mind, introducing the chapter by talking about the famous debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. The debates lasted at least five hours, and it intrigued Postman that they were so popular. Postman says that the attention span back then was much longer, because now an attention span like that does not exist. Postman also discusses how Lincoln and others spoke their thoughts in a way that was ‘pure print’. It was like every word that was said came out of a book, or could be put into one. He implies that we can’t have what it takes to process a message if it were spoken that way in today’s world. Finally, he discusses the introduction of advertisements in the1860s. In an 1896 newspaper, Procter and Gamble created a slogan for Ivory soap, and other companies began using pictures and short catch phrases to catch attention. Postman thinks of this as a time when advertisers stopped assuming that the customers these advertisements were aimed toward were intelligent enough to understand advertisements that were delivered in actual writing.
In chapter five, Postman discusses how two ideas came together whose convergence provided America with a new metaphor of public discourse. These ideas laid the foundation for the Age of Show Business. He says one idea was "as old as the cave paintings of Altamira" and the new idea was that transportation, or distance, and communication could be disengaged from each other. He then begins to talk about the telegraph, where Postman believes that the telegraph made information "essentially incoherent” because the telegraph was only used to transmit information, and not to analyze it. After this, Postman provides the old idea: the importance of pictures, delivered through photographs. He begins to explain this by first stating that photography is not a language, even though there’s a common tendency to discuss it as one. Rather than evoking a particular idea, a photograph, is concerned only with certain things. Lastly, Postman argues that a "peek-a-boo" world had emerged, a world where an event pops into consciousness for a moment and then disappears without any thought about why. He claims it is entertaining, but leaves us with nothing to do with any information received. However, the real problem came when life began to be this way and that is what he thinks happened when television became the main media-metaphor.
In the first several chapters, Postman begins with talking about how our world has become more aware and interested into entertainment and forms of that, rather than what the entertainment is presenting. He argues that different forms of communication is changing the definition of what truth is, and how those watching different forms may have their opinion changed on what it is. In chapters three and four, he talks about attention span and how back when Lincoln was around, the attention span lasted much longer than now. Also, cartoons and advertisements came to be, suggesting that society may not process information as well with words rather than with pictures. He then describes two ideas, and how photography isn’t a language because you can’t analyze a photo like you can with anything else. Postman is intelligent and makes good points, but his writing still takes a while for me to understand. Sometimes I agree with what he’s saying, but sometimes I roll my eyes and think he must’ve been negative when it comes to entertainment. Regardless, this book so far has opened my eyes about how far technology has come, and what someone like Postman thinks of it.