TAMIL NATION LIBRARY: Media & Manufacturing Consent

• * Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business  - ISBN-10: 014303653X

* indicates link to Amazon.com online bookshop

[see also Informing Ourselves To Death - Neil Postman Speech at a meeting of the German Informatics Society on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart, sponsored by IBM-Germany]

From Wikipedia: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), is a book by Neil Postman in which he argues that media of communication inherently influence the conversations carried out over them. Postman posits that television is the primary means of communication for our culture and it has the property of converting conversations into entertainment so much so that public discourse on important issues has disappeared. Since the treatment of serious issues as entertainment inherently prevents them from being treated as serious issues and indeed since serious issues have been treated as entertainment for so many decades now, the public is no longer aware of these issues in their original sense, but only as entertainment. ("Conversations" in the sense here of a culture communicating with itself).

The book originated with Postman's delivering a talk to the Frankfurt Booksellers Convention in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell's 1984 and the contemporary world. It has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide.

"Neil Postman's book 'Amusing Ourselves To Death' is an excellent look at the world today (more accurately in 1985). He explains that there is no need to fear George Orwell's vision of 1984, but rather to fear an older title of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. One which takes away freedom, the latter giving you all the freedom you want. Funny and witty, Postman gives a top rate analysis of the current media (second to McLuhan). I dont see this book as a prediction of any sort, but rather observing the direction the media of print and television is headed. Television has been given so much authority that it does not matter whats on it, so much that its on." Anthony M. Testani at Amazon.com