Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves To Death Summary

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In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman writes, “For one thing, its attention span would obviously have been extraordinary by current standards. Is there any audience of Americans today who can endure seven hours of talk? or five. or three. Postman 47” to highlight the contrast between Americans in the 1800’s to Americans today. He posits a simple question, could today’s Americans stay engaged in oral discourse spanning multiple hours? I have a simpler answer: No. But why can’t we? in Postman’s book he states “People of a television culture need “plain language” both visually and visually (Postman 47)” suggesting that the complex rhetorical language used amongst the cited Lincoln-Douglas debates would be lost in translation today. While I agree that America would not be …show more content…

Our technology determines our culture and not the way we think. With this, we can see that the introduction of literature, television, the internet, smartphones, and most recently short-form social media platforms are the main culprits for our lack of attention span. And while lack of attention span itself seems to be an innocuous problem, it is an underlying cause of much larger issues. As cited by David Progue from CBS News, a shorter attention span leads to a myriad of downsides, it makes individuals more error-prone, it makes tasks take longer to complete, and more troublesome; and it increases stress. With attention span playing such a vital role in our lives, how could we improve it, or at least mitigate the decay? According to an article by George Washington University, we can try meditation, practice attentive listening, focus on single tasks, limit social media usage, and devote more time to reading. Postman would certainly agree with the end, stating “But most people could read and did

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