Analysis Of Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves To Death'

Neil Postman’s 1985 novel “Amusing Ourselves to Death” presents many interesting and well-thought out claims, one of the major ones being about television and the dangers it presents to society. His main points on this subject pertaining to the fact …”that television has reduced our ability to take the world seriously.” By this, Postman is addressing the fact that all the information we receive now is through the television. Leading into one of his largest, and debatably most important, assertions, our society is morphing into something similar to Aldous Huxley’s “A Brave New World”. Where the people are controlled by entertainment and pleasure. Postman’s work is less of a story and more of a wake-up call or warning. Our image driven society must become less obsessed with our own image and begin to truly comprehend the images that we are putting …show more content…
However, upon reading Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” I now realize that these two things go hand in hand. There are certain parts of Postman’s argument I disagree with, like the fact that we are being controlled by “our pleasures” i.e. that we have become a Huxley-esque society. I think that this idea may be taking things a bit far. I am, however, willing to admit that we have become more and more obsessed with things that we see on TV or similar platforms. This obsession is causing us to rely only on the information presented to us through these platforms. Our attention span for things outside of them has decreased in such a way that we don’t even bother to look into the outside information. The problem is us. Human beings, that is. Postman views the TV as a “value-neutral” tool, meaning, in the end, the TV is just nuts and bolts , the TV does not threaten you if you don’t listen to it. It is after all, just a tool. It is made strong by the importance we place on