As humanity continues to take lunging leaps into a completely modern foray of the digital age, it relinquishes itself as whole into the welcoming arms of connectivity, convenience, and cognizance, or so it presumes. What humanity does not seem to realize is that its reality runs parallel with that of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which in 1936 predicted a realm where human beings grow to embrace their oppression, mindlessly absorb information, and subconsciously ignore any attempts at revolution or uprising. Neil Postman advocates the Huxleyan point of view in the foreword of Amusing Ourselves to Death. Based on the trends of the contemporary era, with the onslaught of television, Internet, and mass media, the Huxleyan hypothesis serves to prophesy better the future of humanity than the Orwellian “Big Brother” inference.
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In the modern era, television has grown into the one of the most conducive outlets of information for the general public. From various news channels to fruitless reality shows, television is now a channel by which an abundant variety of information flows. What the public does not realize, however, is that instead of “depriv[ing] us of information,” several forms of contemporary news media are giving us “so much [information] that we [are] be[ing] reduced to passivity and egoism.” The described situation of the television corroborates Postman’s argument that Huxley’s predictions are more relevant today. Majority of the information that flows unrelentingly from the screens of televisions into the asinine viewer’s mind serves no educational purpose. Instead certain forms of this medium impede an average person’s ability to think for themselves, which in itself could be considered a type of intellectual oppression. Another facet of modern news distribution that supports Huxley’s outlook is the
In the modern era, television has grown into the one of the most conducive outlets of information for the general public. From various news channels to fruitless reality shows, television is now a channel by which an abundant variety of information flows. What the public does not realize, however, is that instead of “depriv[ing] us of information,” several forms of contemporary news media are giving us “so much [information] that we [are] be[ing] reduced to passivity and egoism.” The described situation of the television corroborates Postman’s argument that Huxley’s predictions are more relevant today. Majority of the information that flows unrelentingly from the screens of televisions into the asinine viewer’s mind serves no educational purpose. Instead certain forms of this medium impede an average person’s ability to think for themselves, which in itself could be considered a type of intellectual oppression. Another facet of modern news distribution that supports Huxley’s outlook is the