My book club decided to read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) this month. I confess that I knew very little about it, but the person who chose it described it as apt for the current moment and, now having read it, not only agree, but am surprised that it hasn’t come up more in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election. (That said, a quick Google search shows that I’m far from the only person to see its relevance today). The book is not only prescient, but in some ways works better today than it might have done when it was first published. At the same time, I think it overstates some of the transformations that have occurred in the television era and creates a flawed (if not wholly false) dichotomy between print and other kinds of media.
I’ve decided to jot down some thoughts on the book. In this post, I’ll focus on Postman’s central claim and why the book so struck me reading it in 2025. Next, I’ll lay out some of the things that the book, for all its brilliance, misses and how we might nonetheless use it to think about our present predicament.
The basic claim of the book is that the rise of television has represented not simply a transformation in the kinds of media that Americans in particular consume, but in the way information is itself disseminated, understood, and utilized. Postman himself approvingly quotes Marshall McLuhan’s now-clichéd claim that “the medium is the message” (8) as an effective, if not entirely complete, summation of the book’s thesis. Contrasting the print era (lasting from the Founding to the early twentieth century) to the television era of the then-present (and, presumably, the now), Postman argues that the transformation in the way information is produced and disseminated has broken our ability to make rational decisions. Everything is now entertainment.
Throughout, Postman returns to a central contrast between George Orwell and Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one” (xxi). Television has not only dominated the media landscape, but has functionally changed what it means to engage information itself. For instance, according to Postman, the rise of the telegraph and then of television has made it so that our information landscape is effectively global. While this means that ordinary Americans have the ability now to know what is happening around the world in ways unknown before, it has also detached that knowledge from the ability to act: “For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means simultaneously that they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency” (68-69). We have become passive — not wanting to read that book — not because television features trash (though I think Postman thinks it generally does), but because the structure of how we consume information has changed in a way that has broken the link between knowledge and action.
For Postman, this break has occurred because of the essential form of television, whether you’re watching a soap, a sitcom, or 60 Minutes. Whereas print facilitated rational thought processes (Postman: “To engage with the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning” (51)), television plays on our desire for pleasure (Postman: “Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure” (87)). Information presented on television is disaggregated from real life. The comedy hit bleeds into the lurid account of a murder on the local news which feeds into a late night host monologue.
Ultimately, even the most informative of television offerings become just another piece of entertainment. “What is happening here,” Postman declares, “is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation” (107). Drawing us forward 40 years, it is for this reason that so many Americans were unable to distinguish between Trump the entertainer and Trump the real business person (such as he was). Those who are unable to understand that politics is not just entertainment. That the American system is not natural, existing without our input. The problem we face, viz Postman, is not that misinformation seeps into the news, but rather the structure of how we get our information is essentially false.
One can only wonder what Postman would make of the current age of social media, whether for him it would be but an extension of what he diagnosed in the 1980s or a new medium entirely. Regardless, as Laura Miller writes in Slate, “Postman detected early on the replacement of reason and facts with vibes” that so characterizes our current landscape. And yet, current communication technology rests, to a great deal, on that old “rational” form of print, which I plan on talking a bit more about in my next post. At the same time, as Miller notes, Postman’s essential concern — that we would become so complacent in the wake of television as to accept our own domination — seems a bit quaint in light of the Trump administrations more Orwellian efforts at censorship and social control. Regardless, Postman understood that accepting a media form committed to manipulating its audience, to treating people like children, and to reducing everything to entertainment could only end badly, with an entire polity unable to distinguish between what was false and what was true. Even more, Postman puts in plain language a method for analyzing how we got here and for subjecting our current media environment to critique. As Postman concludes, “The problem…does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch. The solution must be found in how we watch.” (160). It seems fair, in 2025, to replace “watch” with “post.”