Postman Review

Overall, I believe Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death provides a relevant message to today’s society despite having been written over twenty years ago. Postman stresses that “the medium is the message” and today’s medium is the television, thus creating a visual society. No longer is the norm to read the Sunday paper over coffee. Now people are getting their news and entertainment from the television and the steadily increasing internet.

Today’s society is so concerned with the way people look they aren’t really listening to the message that is being broadcast. This is especially relevant in our Hollywood celebrities and TV newscasters. Basically, anyone that’s on the air is “beautiful” unless they are purposefully made to be ugly. Postman touches on this when he says “Most (television newscasters) spend more time with their hair dryers than with their scripts, with the result that they comprise the most glamorous group of people this side of Las Vegas.” Most local newscasters aren’t over the age of 50, especially the women! The public gives men a little more leeway, but in general one must look like they belong on TV.

Postman also writes about education systems attempting to integrate more multi-media into its curriculum. He uses studies done to provide evidence that “television viewing does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking. This relates well to W. James Potter’s book Media Literacy. He writes about our society becoming passive learners through the television media. In other words, there’s no thinking involved when we watch the television. We may watch news programs and other informational programs, but we aren’t really learning anything because we’re not really paying attention. Potter says news has become more about entertaining people than informing them. “This news perspective shifts the goal of news workers from informing the public to entertaining as many people as possible, thereby generating the maximum revenue for the news organization. This has led to a focus on the sensational and the superficial.”

While some of the examples Neil Postman uses in his book are a little outdated, he still has a relevant and important message to send to today’s society. That is we have become a society obsessed with looks instead of what’s really important. The television medium has created a somewhat totalitarian attitude among its viewers. The television and those on it know all.