The increasing ubiquity of television in America is at the center of this book’s set of concerns. Because written thoughts can never change, they imply a deliberation on the writer's part, and also an honesty of expression. Postman cites an incident detailed in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in which a sect of religious figures known as the Dunkers refused to publish the tenets of their faith, for fear that by recording their belief system, they would later be limited by the unalterable nature of those utterances. Even the more controversial arguments over Protestant dogma took place through literary arguments in pamphlets, and the great Jonathan Edwards, who could purportedly move any audience to tears with his fiery delivery, spoke in a way that expected his audiences to follow his sculpted arguments. Postman also notes how the press took advantage of this new commodity. Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is an amazingly written and well-argued book. Postman also illustrates how even commerce reflected the rational shape of a print-based discourse. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. Consider the discussion of advertising. As evidence of this prevalence, Postman cites Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a revolutionary pamphlet whose relative success Postman compares to the public success of the Super Bowl. Find a summary of this and each chapter of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business! As he indicates, this is why burning books is considered so philistine; it is destroying what is immortal. No longer was the context controlled, but rather, a photo was placed next to a claim with nothing directly connecting them, and so the audience was now subject to psychological and aesthetic forces. Postman emphasizes that we must first understand the past if we are to understand the present. Chapter 8 Summary 2  Chapter 8 Summary In Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he attempts to persuade Americans that television is changing every aspect of our culture and world. But it is not a “fast read.” There is much to contemplate and ponder. Because the telegraph exists only to transmit information, and not to analyze it, it announces the information as disposable. Throughout history, different cities have been the representations of American culture. By making a proposition in a straightforward print-based way, it allowed the reader to consider whether the facts presented were worth believing. Thus, in Amusing Ourselves to Death he laments that American culture has become so intertwined with TV because TV is a medium which encourages vapid, shallow conversation and … Jack Lule. Not affiliated with Harvard College. 1. Speeches were expected to bear signs of deliberation and the emotional distance of the written word. Postman contrasts this era with the more contemporary televangelists like Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell, who must be careful not to associate themselves too closely with intellectualism lest it alienate their audience. Find a summary of this and each chapter of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business! He quotes theorist Susan Sontag to suggest that a photograph presents only a decontextualized present, and allows us to break reality into component parts, no longer contingent on the greater context. As a subsequent proposition, Postman suggests that the existence of a meaning presupposes that the author is capable of communicating that meaning and that the reader is capable of understanding it. However, what was new in the mid-19th century is that the picture became the primary basis for understanding truth. The reader should note that Postman is being strategically selective about his history, deliberately neglecting to discuss the significant percentage of the American population (like slaves and disenfranchised Native Americans) who were not predominantly literate. This is a historical argument above all else: in the tradition of McLuhan, Postman believes that a history of media forms is also a history of humanity, culture, and even methods of thinking.. “Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. He notes that literacy rates varied relatively little between the poor and the rich, and even between men and women, which was particularly unusual in that moment in history. Sep 8, ... Marx did not pursue the thought but Postman, as the chapter concludes, sets the task as … While Postman is intrigued by this consideration of the written word's permanence, he also sees in it an exception to the … Majhok Chaw University of Maryland University College Amusing Ourselves To Death Summary Essay. Firstly, language is a medium through which one thing is meant to evoke something else. This summary is readily available in the study guide for this unit and has all the information you need to formulate... Chapter Three, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Even the Mayflower was unique in the way it considered its books amongst its most precious cargo. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. Intellectual, popular, working-class, aristocratic—all spheres of culture revolved around print media in their own way. Teachers and parents! Postman notes that the audience was not respectful and somber, but instead enlivened and prone to outbursts of support or denigration towards either Lincoln or Douglas. This question is best answered in GradeSaver's summary and analysis for Chapter One of Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. One is inspired to either make or not make changes, but nevertheless, that text has inspired something of relevance. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Contrarily, the introduction of slogans, images and jingles created a decontextualized experience in an ad. Two technological developments in the mid-19th century changed public discourse and paved the way for the Age of Entertainment. We were not only better readers and writers—we were better thinkers. Copyright © 1999 - 2021 GradeSaver LLC. It is, in a word, rational. The "penny newspaper" had long been obsessed with "elevating irrelevance to the status of news," but while they had a local, regional audience, the sudden emergence of available instantaneous information from throughout the country led to most newspapers becoming purveyors of this same type of irrelevant information. By delivering the most historically concentrated synthesis of image and information, and by bringing this synthesis into everyone's home, television forced all modes of discourse into a realm of entertainment. Because a text is generally spoken to nobody in particular (but rather to an unnamed audience), it is therefore directed towards everyone. A photograph, on the other hand, is concerned only with particulars. Postman suggests that two ideas intersected in the middle of the 19th century to lay the foundation for the Age of Show Business. Because they could read and write, they could both influence and be influenced by important social events. Though a common man with minimal education, the public never doubted that "such powers of written expression could originate" from him (35). Postman gives several examples of how the information of the "news of the day" does not have the power to inspire action in us. We do not respond to words themselves, but in fact look past those words to discern meaning. The Charles Dickenses of the world have been replaced by the Michael Jacksons—and Postman, of course, assumes that we will judge Jackson as inferior. The new idea was that distance no longer impeded the duration of communication. Chapter Three, Amusing Ourselves to Death In the 19th century, Americans primarily read newspapers and pamphlets that focused on politics. Thirdly, language only functions through context – one proposition needs to be both preceded and followed in order to make any sense. Overall, Postman illustrates that "well into the nineteenth century, America was as dominated by the printed word and an oratory based on the printed word as any society we know of" (41). In terms of image, Postman suggests that readers of the 18th and 19th century would have judged their public figures by the strength of their language and propositions. Further, Postman believes that the telegraph made information "essentially incoherent" (69). The expectation was that the reader was rational enough to discern the claim being made, and then to decide whether the product warranted his or her patronage; advertisements of this era appealed to the intellect rather than emotions. I. Their respective speeches were always at least one hour long, so that the entire debate spanned up to seven hours or more. He cites evidence of the way people spoke in the "impersonal" style of writing, even in such passionate, fiery outbursts like those of The Great Awakening. He loves the idea of Typographic America because that media-metaphor allowed and encouraged everyone to be engaged. Postman cites an incident detailed in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in which a sect of religious figures known as the Dunkers refused to publish the tenets of their faith, for fear that by recording their belief system, they would later be limited by the unalterable nature of those utterances. Finally, one can continue to question whether this book remains relevant, though these chapters make a strong argument for its continued importance. One of these ideas was new, and the other was "as old as the cave paintings of Altamira" (64). Amusing Ourselves to Death In the introduction to his book Postman said that reality was reflected more by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World where the public was oppressed by pleasure than Orwell's 1984 where they were oppressed by pain. It lacks any impulse to categorize, to require its audience to connect it to anything other than itself. Its basic thesis is that television has negatively affected the level of public discourse in contemporary America, and it considers media in a larger context to achieve that. After discussing in more depth how the photograph created an illusory but still irrelevant context for irrelevant news, Postman points out how the crossword puzzle became popular around this time, suggesting that the public was learning to think in terms of irrelevant, decontextualized information. After further in-depth consideration of how reading led to a historical shift towards reason over other faculties, Postman provides examples of how discourse was influenced towards reason in Typographic America. Telegraphy and photography stripped information from its context. What intrigues Postman most is not the nature of their debate, but that the debates were so popular. Amusing Ourselves to Death Summary Chapter 5: Decontextualizing the World . Postman argues that our very speech patterns were different when we were a print culture. On Reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Chapter 6. Early advertisements – of which he provides two examples – were a paragraph in length, composed of long sentences with multiple clauses, and a simply made claim. All of these elements are those which make Postman so value reading and writing – they force one to grapple with the world, rather than blowing off what is uninteresting or not immediately accessible. Amusing Ourselves To Death was the result of his appearance. While speaking across a continent had obvious value, Postman argues, partly through quoting Thoreau, that telegraphy also redefined discourse in a pernicious fashion, for it "not only [permitted] but [insisted] upon a conversation" between regions that had little to say to one another (65). Nevertheless, the prevalence of the printing press increased unopposed, allowing ideas to cross regional boundaries, evidence of which Postman provides as the Federalist Papers. Further, the prevalence of literacy had a truly democratic aura – "no literary aristocracy emerged in Colonial America," but instead even the poorest of laborers could engage in the cultural dialogue afforded by print (34). He then gives historical examples of writers and thinkers who have explored the way reading "encourages rationality" by forcing the reader to compare ideas, claims, and grammatical constructions to first identify the author's meaning and then to compose a personal response to that meaning (51). Advertising in its early forms, Postman argues, essentially assembled "a context in which the question, Is this true or false? Here’s his line of argument in 3 lessons: The 19th century was the age of reading. Without restating his argument, it is useful to collect all of his thoughts about what a print and oratory based culture offers. Instant downloads of all 1392 LitChart PDFs Postman says it is important to continue to investigate how the printing press shaped colonial American epistemology, in order to address the problem of the decline (according to Postman) of rational conversation in 20th century America. Chapter 3 – Typographic America. These stories had little to offer to a region far removed from where they occurred, but the lack of context was no longer an issue for consideration. A photograph, on the other hand, is an object in itself, and requires no context. The act of reading is, therefore, a "serious business" and a "rational activity" (50). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (1985) is a book about the way a communication medium shapes public discourse. Postman’s description of 17th century colonial America is quite nostalgic and idealistic—he renders this period as egalitarian and highly literate. However, what lies behind his arguments are more pervasive attacks that he does not explicitly make. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. Amusing ourselves to death. Foreigners were impressed not only by the high rates of literacy in the New World, but also by the prevalence of lecture halls wherein the public would entertain great thinkers and writers for their own edification. Spoken sentences were longer, more complex, and more rigorously logical—and listeners, whose minds were used to this kind of print-based language, were able to digest and follow this kind of spoken print. It has so thoroughly defined what we think of as truth that we no longer question the way in which it works. Chapter Summary for Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, part 1 chapter 4 summary. His long emphasis on "Typographic America" is important not only for elucidating his meaning about how media-metaphors influence the mode of public discourse, but also for providing an image of how the world could be if we could break television's sway. Check out our revolutionary side-by-side summary and analysis. Information became a commodity valuable for being a novelty rather than for being important towards informing the public. The crossword puzzle provided a context for all of this meaningless information, whereas in the Age of Exposition, people did not need to find contexts for news that was delivered, precisely because it fit within an already existing context. New forms of media don’t merely affect what kinds of people become popular heroes, but also how individuals think and process. He then announces his purpose to further explore how print in typographic America dictated the mode of discourse. Summary Foreword. Postman considers that this perspective of reading as a "moral duty" resulted from the way that published texts freed Europeans from the confines of their local communities (33). However, the real problem came when not only news, but life, followed this peek-a-boo shape, and this is what he suggests happened when television became the primary media-metaphor. Noting that we can only vote for candidates every two to four years, he suggests that this world of incessant, de-contextualized news only allows us to form more opinions about the news, opinions which then become news themselves to feed the vicious circle. It is entertaining, but neither allows nor permits us to do anything about the information it provides. Postman briefly considers Thomas Paine himself as a reflection of these ideas. As America battled to conquer the frontier, it used electricity to ultimately create the telegraph, which allowed information to travel faster than a human being could. The simple context no longer existed, and so was rationality no longer the primary tool being used to engage a consumer. The way people thought and spoke would be influenced by this new media-metaphor. LitCharts Teacher Editions. In effect, Postman argues that a "peek-a-boo" world had come into being, a world wherein an event pops into consciousness for a moment and then disappears without any pretense at "coherence or sense" (77). He provides examples of how advertising expected its audience to be literate and rational. A headline provided its own context, and has no purpose to explain why it matters. My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class.”. The implied question here is: could Charles Dickens have existed in the 20th century the way he did in the 19th? As Richard Hofstader reminds us, America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations” (41). To Postman, that city is now Las Vegas. Postman notes that even lectures—spoken words—took on the quality of print. These three chapters work together to end Part I by providing an equally theoretical and practical framework to understand Postman's method and purpose in Amusing Ourselves to Death. is relevant" (60). In short, print as a media-metaphor resonated in a specific way through the expectations and thought-processes of the public who lived in its age. Why do you think that TV showbiz took over typography as the dominant medium? This fit in with the decontextualized model of telegraph news because an objective photo gave some sense of reality to news that otherwise had little to do with the listener's life. Check out our revolutionary side-by-side summary and analysis. Amusing Ourselves to Death is not a long book — 163 pages of text. Find a summary of this and each chapter of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business! Postman seeks in this chapter to consider what is unique about oratory and the written word, and how it influenced the minds of those who lived under it. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman.The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. On Reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Chapter 3. Chapter Summary for Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, part 2 chapter 6 summary. Neil Postman (1985) claims that “the news of the day” did not exist-could not exist in a world that lack the media to get it expression” (p. 7). Read the Study Guide for Amusing Ourselves to Death…, View Wikipedia Entries for Amusing Ourselves to Death…. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Central to the contrasting ideas of these chapters, then, is the public. As previously noted, Postman seems to view the public as victim to whatever media-metaphor exists in its time. The implicit suggestion here is that our love of football and advertising has replaced our love of reason, language, and learning. Postman begins to contrast his particular vision of the super-literate colonial past with our present day. No matter how banal the idea behind a piece of writing, it is only functional and relevant if it indeed has an idea behind it. This quasi-Marxist critique is certainly something Postman would have been aware of, and it is interesting that he so conspicuously refuses to even postulate it. Cedars, S.R.. McKeever, Christine ed. They were inspired to be part of the cultural conversation that reading allowed. Nevertheless, the book continues to inspire that type of consideration. As early as 1985, it claimed that the rise of TV would be our fall. The Medium is the Metaphor. Not only is Postman fascinated by the extent of the audience's attention span (which he believes does not exist today), but he is also inspired by the way they were apparently capable of contextualizing the long, winding sentences of the relatively complicated prose in which the speakers presented themselves. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. While Postman is intrigued by this consideration of the written word's permanence, he also sees in it an exception to the rule of colonial America, which found great comfort and faith in the written word. He notes that he will later explore how television inspires a discourse of "marginal" content (49). Postman acknowledges that the Age of Exposition did not immediately die under these news pressures, but does illustrate that the writers of this age – like Faulkner or Fitzgerald – focused on the way in which people were disconnected from one another, as though implicitly acknowledging what was happening. It is through arguments like these that Postman most seems like a curmudgeonly reactionary, and often might appear to students that way. The photograph of the tree needs not acknowledge the cliffside or underground system of roots that ensure its survival. He further suggests that reading had a "sacred" element in those days because most people had much less leisure time than we do, and so the choice to read was more pronounced (62). As noted before, Postman tends to ignore any discussion of power structures that might enforce these strictures for their own gain. To begin his exploration of how print as a media-metaphor influenced the discourse of its time, Postman considers the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas publicly debated one another when competing for the Illinois state senate seat. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a book about epistemology – and how it is actively being changed by new forms of media.Neil Postman makes a powerful argument about the importance of the written word, about how by its nature, it is more conducive to a true understanding of the world, whereas other forms of media, that rely on pictures, are a poor substitute. And most interestingly of all, the crossword puzzle suggests that news had found a new purpose: not to elucidate or aid, but to amuse. Further, a photograph presents itself as "objective," as "fact" (72-73). The first symptom of this new conversation was the transferral of "context-free information" - information that was not tied to any practical function in the listener's life. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." Postman uses, “As America moved into the nineteenth century,” Postman continues, “it did so as a fully print-based culture in all of its regions.” Literature, newspapers, and pamphlets were ubiquitous. Even uneducated people could react to long, intelligent discussions about slavery because they could weigh the propositions being put forward. He contrasts this with typographic culture, in which news and arguments had a direct correlation to the context in which they were spoken, whether that was regional or topical. If you wanted to exchange ideas, you did so in a pamphlet, a debate forum, or a lecture—all places where the form of printed language lent itself to a more sophisticated and elegant content. For instance, one cannot photograph nature; one can only photograph a tree, or a particular perspective of a cliffside. None of this, Postman acknowledges, is a new idea. Lectures and debates didn’t sound like idle conversation—they sounded like writing. This type of news had always existed in some form, but it now became the primary form of news. He argues that in a world still almost exclusively dominated by the written word, the public was accustomed to literary, complicated oratory modeled on written language. On the other hand, the public in a Peek-a-Boo world are no longer able to even realize the way in which they are not being engaged. A word evokes a particular idea, which is part of a larger context that leads us into abstraction. Therefore, every reader has the opportunity (or compulsion) to engage in dialogue with it. Mass media -- Influence. He notes how religious discourse was framed in early America as a series of rational dialogues, so that more emotionally-detached faiths like Deism were "given their say in an open court" (53). Asked by Kristin D #601493 Instant downloads of all 1391 LitChart PDFs (including Amusing Ourselves to Death). He suggests that our culture's language became a "language of headlines – sensational, fragmented, impersonal" (70). The passage from Chapter 3 of the novel, Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, demonstrates Postman’s argument that nineteenth century America was primarily focused on political writings rather than books. "Amusing Ourselves to Death Chapters 3-5 Summary and Analysis". Bibliography: p. Includes index. Asked by Kristin D #601493 He asks what action we plan to take regarding trouble in the Middle East, or crime rates. Amusing Ourselves to Death Summary Amusing Ourselves to Death is a work that aims to both explore complicated ideas and market itself to the general public. Everything Postman describes about the Peek-a-Boo world is doubly true about the Internet, where the public is not only privy to, but in control of, the incessant flow of information. By the time a politician would have visited a community, his public would have known him as the speaker or writer of certain tracts or ideas. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Postman notes that advertising remained an "essentially serious and rational enterprise" until as late as 1890, after which it began to shift into entertainment and spectacle rather than rational claim (59). He or she could now feel that this headline was connected to his or her life because the illusion revealed that the news did in fact occur in real life. Amusing Ourselves to Death study guide contains a biography of Neil Postman, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary On Reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Chapter 8 - Jack Lule . It is here that Postman provides the very old idea that brought on the Age of Show Business – the prominence of pictures, delivered through photographs. Much Internet humor derives from decontextualizing artists or politicians from their primary context, and the prevalence of photo manipulation allows even an amateur photographer to suggest extreme ideas that have the weight of objectivity without any pretense towards accuracy. He begins to explain this concept by first indicating that photography is not quite a "language," despite the common tendency to discuss it as such (72). Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Because the laws were based on immutable recorded precedents, a lawyer was expected to be rational, learned, and literary, while he in turn expected his audience (whether juries or the public) to also have a grasp of legal thought and ideas. Because it could present itself as irrefutable truth without any context, the photo became the primary way through which news, advertising, and information were presented. In fact, he acknowledges that the speeches were part of a "carnival-like atmosphere" of bands and liquor, though the complexity of the arguments nevertheless remained sound enough to warrant contemporary attention (47). Moreover, this public was accustomed to seeking oratory in other venues outside debates, meaning these were not unique events. Amusing Ourselves to Death is one of the classics in the fields of cultural criticism and Amusing Ourselves to Death Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis . As another example, Postman explains how lawyers in typographic America tended to see law as a rational exercise, as opposed to a theatrical one meant to sway juries. His first proposition is that print and oratory must necessarily have "a content" - a subject around which it is centered (49). ... Summary Notes. Chapter Three, Amusing Ourselves to Death In the 19th century, Americans primarily read newspapers and pamphlets that focused on politics. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. Thirdly, language only functions through context – one proposition needs to be and. Spheres of culture revolved around print media in their own way century was the result of his thoughts about a! Evoke something else become secondary, a `` serious Business '' and a `` of. D # 601493 Instant downloads of all 1392 LitChart PDFs ( including Ourselves. 50 ) print culture in fact look past those words to discern meaning change, they read... Or not make changes, but that the written word ( and oratory based on it ) is essentially from. Next wishes to explain why it matters telegraph exists only to transmit information, and often might appear to that! New in the middle of the tree needs not acknowledge amusing ourselves to death summary chapter 3 cliffside underground. Our culture 's language became a commodity valuable for being important towards informing the.! 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