television is entertainment at its worst

Book review:

Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

by Neil Postman (1931-2003)

New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books/Viking, 1985

184 pages

This is a rare treasure—a can’t-put-it-down kind of book.

I wish I’d read it 40 years ago.

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a 184-page drumbeat of insight and reality about the devastating impact of television on our culture and our prospects of living the good life.

Postman, a media theorist and cultural critic, says television “is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.” (p. 141)

He wrote the book before the internet got really started, and before the enhanced horrors of social media like Facebook and Twitter and TikTok.

He continued to write about the failures of our educational enterprises and the negative impacts of technology on our culture.

Don’t let Amusing Ourselves to Death be the only Postman book you read in the near future.

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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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Amusing Ourselves to Death (book review)