I was a skeptic when Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business came out in 1985. A book attacking the frivolity of television seemed, well, frivolous, just another trendy overhyped attack on the way we live now. Hadn’t people always loved pop culture, entertainment, fun? Hadn’t public discourse always included plenty of show business? I was so hostile to the idea that anything fundamental had changed for the worse since Elizabethans flocked to watch bearbaiting around the corner from the Globe Theatre, I confess I didn’t even read the book.
What did I miss? According to Postman, I was busy looking for signs of the grim future presaged by Orwell in 1984—government censorship, coerced conformity, threats to free speech—when I should have worried more about the world foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, in which those in power control an all-too-willing population with recreational drugs, casual sex, and other hedonistic delights. In the contest between an Orwellian future and a Huxleyan one, the latter had clearly won. After all, government coercion is unnecessary if everyone is having a good time while their rights are stolen and their brains are addled. Memory holes are not needed if people don’t pay attention in the first place. Orwell imagined people forced to have a two-way TV in their apartments—a screen that simultaneously spouted propaganda and watched the citizenry 24/7. In our Huxleyan world, we stare at our phones all day voluntarily while these beloved devices collect all manner of intimate data on us. It’s Big Brother, but fun.
It was Marshall McLuhan who famously argued that the medium is the message: A society is organized according to its methods of communication. Postman has a similar thesis: The medium is the metaphor. This byword seems a little murky to me, but never mind. Postman means that our very thought processes are organized according to the dominant medium of our time—and television is ruining them. Beginning in the fifteenth century, he explains, the printing press began to change how we thought. It democratized and secularized knowledge; typography promoted close attention to words and a logical way of thinking, in which complex ideas could be connected to each other at length. Widespread literacy in colonial and nineteenth-century America was much noted by de Tocqueville and other European visitors. Most people, including women, could read—Protestantism required much home Bible reading and much careful listening to long, long sermons.
Postman marvels at the attention span of ordinary Americans during what he calls the Age of Exposition. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, involved a three-hour speech by each man, with hour-long rebuttals. At one point, observing that Douglas, who went first, had just finished speaking and it was already 5 p.m., Lincoln suggested the audience go home for dinner and come back for the rest of it—and........