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TAMIL
NATION LIBRARY: Media & Manufacturing Consent
-
* Neil
Postman -
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business * 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
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