Amusing Ourselves to Death Chapters 1-4 essays

Amusing Ourselves to Death Chapters 1-4 essays The author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, made the world aware of public discourse in the age of show business. He used the books Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and George Orwells 1984 as examples of what technology has done to todays youth. Orwells views were that he had a fear of those who would ban books, deprive us of information, and what we hate will ruin us. Huxley on the other hand feared that there would be no reason for banning a book because people would chose not to read and believed that we would be swarmed with information and be reduced to submissiveness and selfishness (Postman vii). Huxley also thought what we loved would ruin us (Postman viii). In this book, Postman tries to prove that maybe Huxley and not Orwell were right (Postman viii). In the U.S. a main point for American spirit would have to be Las Vegas. Its like a symbol of a city devoted to entertainment. Everything in Las Vegas deals with some form of entertainment (Postman 3). Therefore we all move closer to amusing ourselves to death. The least amusing people are those who are professional entertainers (Postman 5). On a show staring Reverend Billy Graham, Reverend Green assured the audience that God loves those who make people laugh (Postman 5). He merely mistook NBC for God. On television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images not words (Postman 7). This book is an investigation into and expression of grief about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of printed works and the superiority of Television (Postman 8). The media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the cultures intellectual and social concerns. Although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated by every medium of communication. E...