Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death

I grew up in a rural town in Southwest Minnesota. Growing up in a rural town, three simple values were instilled in me: work hard to be excellent at whatever you do, be honest and fair in your interactions with others, and say please and thank you when dealing with the wait staff at restaurants. I have always found politics unappealing, despite my fascination with the cause and effect relationship of public policy. This disconnect has always been confusing to me until I read chapter nine of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. This chapter enlightened me as to why I have always found politics so unappealing. The reason is that in the conversation about politics, the medium allowances entirely misalign with my three values. In this chapter, …show more content…
Politics is often compared to both sports and show business. Postman entertains both ideas before decidedly showing politics is far more similar to show business than sports. The discrepancy between sports and politics is that “in any sport the standard of excellence is well known to both the players and spectators, and an athlete’s reputation rises and falls by his or her proximity to that standard” (125). This causes three virtues to be associated with sports: clarity, honesty, and excellence. The virtues of any individual are evident to any other individual who is knowledgeable about the sport. However, politics tend to have none of these virtues. This is because politics is far better represented by show business than sports. The problem with this is that, with show business, “its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice” (126). This means that, in politics instead of having the virtues associated with sport, the goal is to appear to be clear, honest, and excellent. The keyword here is “appear”. This suggests that the politicians are essentially selling themselves. They do this simply by advertisement. This means that “the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial” (126). Thus, in the …show more content…
The most popular mediums are mainstream media outlets and Twitter. The foremost goal of these mediums, which is entertainment, has the propensity for these mediums to provide, not inherently false information, but decontextualized information. This flaw is compounded by the medium’s predisposition to exclude those who want to have a nuanced, meaningful, and rational discussion about politics. The reason why the medium possesses this predisposition is as a byproduct of the goal of entertainment first and everything else second. This causes a brevity of messages which leaves absolutely no time or space for nuance or any meaningful discussion which would require a length longer than the medium allows. For example, tax cuts are a significant focus of the political discourse right now. However, from reading through the tweets of the President of the United States, his main medium for communication, all I know is that taxes will be cut and it will be “fantastic!” There is practically no discussion on how these tax cuts will redistribute wealth among classes in America, or how the tax cuts will impact our current deficit spending and growing national debt. Clearly, the medium does not encourage any factual evaluation of policies introduced, causing a form of decontextualized misinformation. The main consequence of having a medium of political discourse that regularly displays decontextualized misinformation and