Amusing Ourselves to Death

Postman argues that the form of a medium determines what kind of content it can carry, and that the shift from print to television changed public discourse from exposition to entertainment. His framing device is the contrast between Orwell, who feared information would be withheld, and Huxley, who feared people would be given so much amusement that they would stop caring, and Postman argues that Huxley was right.

His historical section documents what he calls the age of exposition. He uses the Lincoln and Douglas debates, in which audiences listened to seven hours of complex argument, as evidence that print-based culture produced a public capable of following extended reasoning. He argues that typography imposes a linear, propositional and analytical structure on thought, and that a culture organised around reading develops different cognitive habits than one organised around images.

The television section argues that the medium requires entertainment, that this is not a failure of programming but a property of the form, and that applying it to news, politics, religion and education degrades all four. His treatment of news as a sequence of decontextualised fragments introduced by the phrase now this is the most cited passage. He also argues that television advertising replaced argument about products with images about consumers.

The book was published in 1985 and its predictions about political discourse anticipated much of what followed on the internet, which Postman did not live to analyse. Critics argue that he romanticises the print era, that the Lincoln and Douglas audiences were not typical, and that he underestimates television's capacity for serious work. The argument that the medium constrains the content is the durable contribution.