Amusement Goes Supernova: Reading Postman Today

Alan Jacobs has pointed out that since we all already know and understand the Standard Critique of Technology, we don’t need to spend any more time and energy on it; instead we need to take it to heart and get on with the business of pursuing the true, the good, and the beautiful, in, through, and despite the technologies that surround us. Even so, revisiting the “classics” of technology criticism can be a worthwhile exercise, especially when the technology under consideration has changed as much as the difference between television and smartphones. Moreover, returning to the original texts instead of relying solely on second-hand accounts can itself be an important way to push back against the very habits of intellectual short-cutting that digital technologies foster.

Both reasons proved true for me when I read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death for the first time earlier this year. When I began, I wasn’t convinced that I needed to read this book for myself. I grew up hearing references to Postman frequently in sermons and talks, so I assumed I already understood his central thesis: digital technologies are degrading our ability to think and live well. I didn’t doubt the importance of this thesis, just the usefulness of spending time unpacking a mostly outdated book. Little did I know how wrong I was.

From the very first pages, I began to realize that Amusing Ourselves to Death held more depth than I had assumed. Postman lays out his thesis right at the outset: “Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” The contrast in view is between the dystopic visions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—that is, in Huxley’s summary as quoted by Postman, between a dystopia in which people are controlled by pain and ruined by hate, and one in which they are controlled by pleasure and ruined by love. Postman elaborates on the crucial differences:

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. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Postman’s central concern in Amusing Ourselves to Death is that television didn’t only provide plentiful cheap entertainment; it also absorbed all serious information and discussion into its communicative logic and gave us so much of what we liked that we could no longer function as we ought. As a media scholar, Postman understood that television, like all technologies, could never be truly neutral: “in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.” News, religion, politics, education: as each became televised, it assimilated to the over-arching form of televised entertainment, thereby losing its ability to make a unique contribution to human culture.

Postman identifies television as the “command center” of the media and communications culture of the 1980s: “There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television…. Television arranges our communications environment for us in ways that no other medium has the power to do.” As an “ironic” example, Postman points to the computer: although it was being referred to as “the technology of the future,” in Postman’s view “the most important fact about computers and what they mean to our lives is that we learn about all of this from television. Television has achieved the status of ‘meta-medium’—an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well.” Postman could scarcely have imagined just how ironic this example would turn out to be!

When I first read this metaphor of television as the command center, I wanted to laugh at the idea that television, of all things, could be so central to American life and thought. Television’s place in my life has never been much more than negligible, so I can hardly imagine it directing our uses of other media and our very ways of knowing! Yet there is a technology that very much fits that description: the Internet. Only substitute “the Internet” for “television,” and Postman’s description of the command center suddenly sounds eerily true. In fact, the Internet is more of a “command center” than television ever was. With the Internet, I don’t just learn “what movies to see, what books, records and magazines to buy, what radio programs to listen to;” I actually buy those things online, and in many cases I consume them online too. In my home we don’t have a cable box or network subscription, just a TV monitor and an HDMI cable to the nearby desktop, so even the relatively little television I watch comes through the Internet.

As I continued to read Amusing Ourselves to Death, I found myself wrestling to make sense of how Postman’s critique of digital technologies could be simultaneously laughable, prophetic, and understated. And I ultimately concluded that the differences between the Television Age and the Internet Age are just as illuminating as their similarities. In what follows, I’ll unpack this by considering three features of electronic media (which includes both television and the Internet): 1. Electronic media is based on images rather than words. 2. Electronic media is fast and decontextualized. 3. Electronic media is driven by what is entertaining.

Electronic media is image-based

Postman mourns the transition from word-based communication (e.g. pamphlets, letters, and books, but also speeches and debates) to image-based communication. He argues that prior generations, steeped in a print culture, were able to attend to and understand complex sentences and chains of reasoning even when presented in an oral form, such as the multi-hour Lincoln Douglas debates. Television, in contrast, privileged visual appeal over reason, even in areas like politics and religion that should be based on rationality. For example, in a television world, more photogenic candidates and preachers fare better, regardless of the merits of what they actually say; likewise, the credibility of TV news is more a matter of the newscaster’s attractiveness than anything else.

Postman’s reason for preferring word-based over image-based communication is, in a word, reason. He claims that reason is amplified by long-form alphabetic writing (what he called “typography”). According to Postman, written language necessarily fosters rationality because it privileges meaning and because it can be held at a distance in order to be examined and argued with:

Almost all the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively, and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.

I am a philosopher by both disposition and training. I cut my philosophical teeth on Christian apologetics, and I come from the particular strand of Protestantism that takes the Second Commandment (“thou shalt make no images”) most seriously. I love reasoning, logic (both formal and informal), and careful analysis and argumentation. And yet Postman’s unqualified preference for human reason and its handmaiden, alphabetic writing, made me deeply uncomfortable. Why?

Here is my best answer: for all my love of logic, I know well that human reason makes a powerful tool but a poor god. In the words of sixteenth century French polymath Blaise Pascal (my organization’s namesake), “Two excesses: to exclude reason; to admit nothing but reason.” In his effort to show that a television culture commits the former error, Postman himself commits the latter. It was startling that Postman makes no mention of the atrocities that have been committed in the name of rationality (and democracy and capitalism), nor of the many cross-cultural differences in ways of knowing and ways of communicating. Nowhere does his account of written language leave room for imaginative uses of language, such as poetry and story. Does a nursery rhyme have meaning in the same way that a policy brief does, or is it closer to a television advertisement? While I agree with Postman that making decisions based on reason is typically preferrable to the alternatives, I also know that human beings cannot wholly separate thought from desire or habit.

Keeping these concerns in mind, we are now ready to ask what becomes of Postman’s preference for words in the transition from television to the Internet. At first glance, the Internet Age appears to further entrench the dominance of images. What, after all, are YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram if not an endless stream of visual appeal? But it only takes a moment to realize that reality is more complicated than that. I wrote nearly all of this essay on a computer. You are, I can say with near certainty, reading it on a computer or computer-like device. The birth of the Internet has facilitated a revival of written language even as it has seen a proliferation of images and videos. These coexist and interweave because the Internet is a more complex technology than television. True, most Internet-based writing hardly rises to the high standards of rationality that Postman desired. But, as we have just noted, printed writing too can range from children’s stories and political doggerel to extended philosophical or theological argumentation. The breadth of linguistic expression available through the Internet is not a critique of the Internet, so much as it is a critique of Postman’s simplistic equivalency between alphabetic writing and reason.

Of course, none of this means that the Internet is above critique. In response to those who insist that “there is more printed matter available today than ever before,” Postman points out that “from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was virtually all that was available,” and therefore the loss of this “monopoly” of the printed word must be recognized even as print continues to enjoy widespread popularity. Just so, it cannot be denied that watching YouTube shorts has made it harder for me not only to read and write longform essays like this one, but even to watch YouTube videos longer than three minutes. Every part of the media ecology affects every other part.

Not only that, but the sheer volume of written content available online is precisely part of the problem. Postman argues, “The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse [during the Typographic Age] was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed material but because of its monopoly.” I push the point further: the power of the printed word was as much in its scarcity as in its dominance over other forms of communication. As Postman later points out, in

a culture that provides little opportunity for leisure … [t]here would have been little casual reading, for there was not a great deal of time for that. Reading would have had a sacred element in it, or if not that, would have at least occurred as a daily or weekly ritual invested with special meaning…. What reading would have been done was done seriously, intensely, and with steadfast purpose.

Faced today with an uncountable abundance of words (both printed and electronic), how much of our reading is “casual” rather than “serious”? And how much reading do we intend to do but never get around to? For every article like this one that you do actually read (thank you!), the Internet will provide you with half a dozen more that you could read, that would likely be at least as interesting and edifying as this one. Don’t believe me? Just scroll to the bottom of this page and count the links.

The bulk of our reading today is casual not simply because there is so much we can choose to read, but because what we do read is connected not to any enduring chain of argument or cultural project, but merely to the preoccupation of the moment. This leads us directly to the next feature of electronic media that Postman critiques.

Electronic media is fast and decontextualized

Postman charges electronic media with producing “information glut” by making information available to us without reference to any context, either of other information or of action we might want or need to take: “For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.” For Postman, this decontextualization of information clearly accompanied the transition from word-based to image-based communication because language argues about the abstract while images merely present particulars. Yet his own historical account belies this idea. He locates the origin of decontextualized information not with the image-centric television but with an information technology that, more than any other, absolutely necessitated alphabetic language: the telegraph. According to Postman,

The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meanings.

Postman asserts that print culture “would have withstood [the] assault” of the telegraph had the photograph not been invented at almost the same time. Of course, this is mere counterfactual speculation; we can never know for sure. Regardless, in the context of the newspaper, the telegraph and the photograph worked together to convey the idea that they were telling us something we really needed to know: “Thus [the photograph] provided the illusion, at least, that ‘the news’ [delivered by telegraph] had a connection to something within one’s sensory experience. It created an apparent context for the ‘news of the day.’ And the ‘news of the day’ created a context for the photograph.” The symbiotic relationship of words and images in the newspaper further confirms that decontextualization can be a feature of either.

Despite this critique of his historical narrative, Postman’s observations about immediate access to irrelevant information certainly sound a prophetic note today. Simply substitute “social media” for “telegraph” in this quote: “The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” I have often tried to revisit a social media post, only to discover that it had disappeared into the shifting sands of my news feed. Not to mention how often auto-refresh has changed the page out from under my very eyes! The social media platforms of today also offer no effective way to sort relevant content in proximity to one another, so cute baby videos and food pics jostle side-by-side with protest announcements and war updates. It is not just the case that each individual post is decontextualized but that the interface itself produces a decontextualization soup. Postman’s newscasters at least had to signal the shift to a new topic verbally with their “Now…This” catchphrase; today’s social media consumers need only scroll to the next post.

Beyond the specific ways that social media platforms work to flatten widely disparate content, the rest of the Internet also lends itself to speed and decontextualization. A fiction novel or philosophical work will sit calmly on my shelf for years, even decades, until the right moment arrives for me to read it. (So, for that matter, will a photo album or a book of comics—two repositories of well-contextualized images.) The Internet offers no such guarantees. Pages and whole websites can be edited with ease or even disappear into thin air. Moreover, most content-producing platforms—from large streaming sites like Netflix and Disney+ to podcasts and even small magazines like Front Porch Republic—feel pressure to update their offerings frequently or risk losing their audience’s fickle attention. In part, this is because of our own media habits. We understand content as something that we consume rather than something we savor, ponder, examine, evaluate. So we expect a constant stream of novelty rather than a steady pool of excellence. (Could it be that the toddler demanding the fiftieth rewatch of the same Bluey episode has better media habits than the rest of us?) But that same constant stream of novelty in turn trains us to pay attention only to what is most recent, disregarding the rest. How many of you are reading this essay more than a few weeks after it is first posted?

At the same time, it’s possible to see the very connectivity of the Internet as an antidote to decontextualization. Just as the Internet permits more extended, alphabetic, logical discourse than television does, so too it supports a richer network of interconnected information. I can attach links to corroborate and contextualize any claim that I make. There are real gains here, not only over television but even over print-based discourse, where each book or letter or pamphlet can in principle stand apart from any other. Yet we must not allow these gains to obscure the fact that this very proliferation of links contributes to the problem of information overload. As another tech critic, Nicholas Carr, has pointed out, “Information overload has become a permanent affliction, and our attempts to cure it just make it worse. The only way to cope is to increase our scanning and our skimming, to rely even more heavily on the wonderfully responsive machines that are the source of the problem.” Every hyperlink that provides valuable confirmation and contextualization also nudges me to skim faster so that I can take in all the available information.

Overall, then, speed and decontextualization are very much problems for the Internet Age, no less than the Telegraph Age and the Television Age. The root cause of these problems is the overwhelming volume of content available to us online. As we grow more weary from trying to stay on top of it all, we find ourselves looking for a break, something that will keep us amused without requiring us to think too hard. And electronic media provides.

Electronic media is entertaining

We come now to what I take to be the heart of Postman’s argument: television as a medium turned every kind of programming into entertainment: “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.” In particular, Postman raises concerns about the amusement-ification of four areas of culture that he believed ought to be treated much more seriously: news, politics, religion, and education. I’ll focus here on my own field of education.

Unsurprisingly, I share Postman’s disdain for cutesy, prepackaged “educational” television (or computer programs), especially if they are treated as a substitute for real interaction with a caring teacher rather than as entertainment that also happens to convey some interesting information. And it is certainly true that learning to live within limits and to take consideration for the future (much less for other people) is difficult and even unpleasant, especially when every other part of our culture (including our technologies) pushes us in the opposite direction. But Postman goes farther: not merely deflating the hype around educational television, but implying that education should be not just hard but unpleasant, and that making learning enjoyable inherently makes it less effective.

Education philosophers have assumed that becoming acculturated is difficult because it necessarily involves the imposition of restraints…. Indeed, Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present, which cannot be pleasurable for those, like the young, who are struggling hard to do the opposite—that is, accommodate themselves to the present.

But there is no reason to assume that making learning easier and more enjoyable necessarily makes it less effective—only that we should not substitute an easy but less educational path for a harder one that involves real learning.

In fact, this idea of substitution is key to the whole issue. Postman was not opposed to entertainment for entertainment’s sake. I doubt he would even be opposed to the kind of educational YouTube channels that I enjoy—provided that I am using them to make my entertainment educational rather than to make my education entertaining. In other words, I wouldn’t want a practicing lawyer or nutritionist to get their information only from YouTube—any more than I would want to stop wrestling with difficult but important books in my own fields of study. But if slick graphics, musical backing, and fast-paced voice-overs help me learn a little legal theory and food science, is there any harm in that?

Maybe not for a grown adult enjoying a few videos to wind down at the end of the day. But content sites like YouTube make the substitution of education for entertainment not only unavoidable but often unnoticed. For example, although YouTube can be blocked on school-issued Chromebooks, the mix of educational and entertaining content available on YouTube incentivizes schools to leave the site unblocked, without any effective means for monitoring whether students are actually using it only for research during school hours.

The same problem of substitution plagues Postman’s other cultural domains: news, politics, and religion. The hyper-connective and functionally infinite Internet can be an asset in each of these domains, just as it can be for education. Yet those very same features make it nearly impossible to separate profitable from superfluous uses of the Internet. Like many younger Americans, I get a significant portion of my news coverage (not to mention my political views) from social media. But I don’t go searching intentionally for this information, as genuinely valuable as it is; rather, it comes to me, or not, at the mercy of the algorithm, which interleaves the silly and the serious into a single “news feed.” When a citizen of the Peek-a-Boo World tuned in to cable news or a popular televangelist, they at least knew what they had signed up for. When I open up Instagram, I literally never know what I will see. I may be informed, edified, or challenged—but no matter what else, I can always expect to be amused.

The Internet Age: Amusement Goes Supernova

Near the end of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman turns briefly from television to computers:

Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology—that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data—will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.

The computers of Postman’s day were little more than word processers: they had not yet been connected to one another via the Internet, and no one could have imagined how easily everyday people would be able to produce and consume content and connect with one another via personal computers and smartphones. Bearing this in mind, Postman’s prescience in this brief remark is astonishing. After all, what differences stand out most clearly between the Age of Television and the Age of the Internet? Surely two of the starkest are the proliferation and accessibility of media choices—Postman’s “massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data.” It is precisely these two factors that make Postman’s portrait of the whole family joined around the TV set for the nightly news appear quaint, even nostalgic. As we each sit glued to the bespoke streams on our own personal devices, available at any time of the day or night, we might wish for a return to the centrality of television. As Carr poignantly observes, “People weren’t carrying TVs in their pockets and pulling them out every few minutes. With smartphones, all time is prime time.”

If television turned everything into entertainment by requiring shows to attract a wide audience that expected to be entertained, the Internet further trivializes all “content” by offering a functional infinity of novelty and stimulation. Unlike television channels, the algorithms of today have no incentive to show us anything that will not appeal to our precise demographic, and infinite scroll has no natural breaks to nudge us to take a walk, pick up a book, or talk to a human being. It is true that I can access (relatively) longform analysis of current events or politics or religion via YouTube or podcasts; competition for viewership and ad revenue notwithstanding, the niche audiences of the Internet do enable certain kinds of content to, if not thrive at least survive, that would never have “made it” in a network television market. But I don’t have to choose such serious discourse instead of yet another dumb cat video. Nothing in the app pushes me to choose one over the other or judges me for my choice.

As Postman points out, “The television screen wants you to remember that its imagery is always available for your amusement and pleasure” (emphasis added). This constant availability has only grown exponentially with the advent of the Internet. It is now truer than ever that “we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.” In fact, not only is digital entertainment available to us at any hour of the day or night, but we now have infinite options for how to amuse ourselves online. This is the crucial difference between Postman’s day and ours; understanding the Internet as an amusement supernova is the real value in reading Amusing Ourselves to Death today.

Image Credit: Erró