Amusing Ourselves To Death Analysis

The concept of amusement has been used as the basis of popular culture as a source of entertainment with its goal of amusing it’s audience but in recent societies has revolutionized and in a response, been critiqued with looking into the inner workings of Disneyland and overall critique of amusement with “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Entertainment has multiple sources such as music, film, television and amusement parks are the basis for popular culture that are primarily seen through media, also termed as mediated culture. The concept of amusement has been revolutionized over time and has adapted its forms, especially through the thrills of amusement parks. Theme parks weren’t always deemed as mediated entertainment but the new concept of …show more content…
From the inside, amusement parks such as Disneyland present this view of American society, in it’s best, altered light, but from the outside looking in, it opens up itself to multiple critiques of the controlling and censoring the entertainment in a way to seem perfect and incomparable in all other aspects. When looking at it, it’s an isolated ground, seemingly disconnected from life beyond the castle. This helps it paints of image of different from everyday life and enhances the perfect illusion it has set. In the case of the book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, Postman (1986), Postman argues that, “…our ability to live a meaningful life, both individually and communally, is compromised by a medium that “must suppress the content of ideas to accommodate the requirements off visual interest.””(Russell,2012)(Postman,1986) Postman’s point is that we, as a society, are addicted and attracted to things that can be deemed as “fluff.” His main point, however is that popular culture has been turned from something that reflects our to something that has become our culture and makes generations of people view the world and it’s ideals in a different