Neil Postman, Revisited: Are We Having Too Much Fun? – The Atlantic

Source: Neil Postman, Revisited: Are We Having Too Much Fun? – The Atlantic by Megan Garber

In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.

I thought of Neil Postman, the professor and the critic and the man who, via his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued preemptively against all this change-via-chuckle. Postman wasn’t, as his book’s title might suggest, a humorless scold in the classic way—Amusing Ourselves to Death is, as polemics go, darkly funny—but he was deeply suspicious of jokes themselves, especially when they come with an agenda.

He might whisper that, in politics, the line between engagement and apathy is thinner than we want to believe.

It wasn’t Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “In Huxley’s vision,” Postman noted, “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history.” Instead: “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us

a condition, Postman put it, in which “facts push other facts into and out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.”

“In a print culture,” he argued, “writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or even worse, don’t care.” In a television culture, he argued, the opposite is true.

Source: Neil Postman, Revisited: Are We Having Too Much Fun? – The Atlantic by Megan Garber