Amusing Ourselves To Death Book Review

[Christa Voth]

Thisis a very high expected-value topic to cover- and it's also interesting how modern people groan in annoyance whenever they hear about the concept of being drowned in entertainment. I remember around 2014 was when I first encountered the concept of instant gratification desensitization- going beyond pavlovian training, and just making the brain refuse to expect to spend time thinking about things in general. Maybe that means that 2014 was when people started to start getting tired hearing about it; I'd consider that anecdata.

I'm keeping this review around for open source intelligence use, since it has a lot of stuff. But, I also think this topic is so important that it's worth being concise when covering it, since the EV of this area is so high that it's worth maximizing communication efficiency. There's also a lot of specialists who analyze things like social media effect on the brain, and are completely unwilling or unable to talk about some of their knowledge, which makes it even more important to make communication more efficient in the limited ways it's possible to do so.

This post summarises and elaborates on Neil Postman's underrated "Amusing Ourselves to Death", about the effects of mediums (especially television) on public discourse. I wrote this post in 2019 and posted it to LessWrong in 2022.

Looking back at it, I continue to think that Postman's book is a valuable and concise contribution and formative to my own thinking on this topic. I'm fond of some of the sharp writing that I managed here (and less fond of other bits).

The broader question here is: "how does civilisation set up public discourse on important topics in such a way that what is true and right wins in the limit?" and the weaker one of "do the incentives of online platforms mean that this is doomed?". This has been discussed elsewhere, e.g. here by Eliezer.

Overall, this seems like an important topic that could benefit greatly from more thought, and even more from evidence and plans. I hope that my review and Postman's book helped bring a bit more attention to it, but they are still far from addressing the points I have listed above.

This is the review I'd write, but better. I'm glad you're bringing it to this forum -- Postman is underrated and more relevant than ever. I've re-read Postman a few times recently, and finally read-to-the-end Brave New World. One thing that I fear: once we've amused ourselves into a dangerous situation, we then become open to illiberalism (perhaps all the way to techno-authoritarianism) to guarantee safety (on the rise of cultural safety-ism: see Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff). It seems plausible we risk a Orwellian-Huxleyan hybrid: Huxleyan societies might grasp Orwellian elements for safety, and Orwellian authorities might turn to Huxleyan techniques to pacify.

Before you pointed it out, I hadn't made the connection between the type of thing that Postman talks about in the book and increasing cultural safety-ism. Another interesting take you might be interested in is by J. Storrs Hall in Where is my flying car? - he argues that increasing cultural safety-ism is a major force slowing down technological progress. You can read a summary of the argument in my review here (search for "perception" to jump to the right part of the review).

Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business by Neil Postman

The first remark I got when I suggested this book to my philosophy discussion group was that it was dated. I agree, so with the following thoughts on this book, I will try to extrapolate and take lessons from it.

Neil Postman, the author of this book takes you through the history of how information was exchanged and consequently how the way we exchanged information came to influence the way we think. How it affected society and the culture.

We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it. (6)

To say it, then, as plainly as I can, this book is an inquiry into and a lamentation about the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television. This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television. (8)

You are mistaken in believing that the form in which an idea is conveyed is irrelevant to its truth. In the academic world, the published word is invested with greater prestige and authenticity than the spoken word. (21)

I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute. (24)

Changes in the symbolic environment are like changes in the natural environment; they are both gradual and additive at first, and then, all at once, a critical mass is achieved, as the physicists say. A river that has slowly been polluted suddenly becomes toxic; most of the fish perish; swimming becomes a danger to health. But even then, the river may look the same and one may still take a boat ride on it. In other word, even when life has been taken from it, the river does not disappear, nor do all of its uses, but its value has been seriously diminished and its degraded condition will have harmful effects throughout the landscape. It is this way with our symbolic environment. (27-28)

What kind of audience was this? (44) For one thing, its attention span would obviously have been extraordinary by current standards. Is there any audience of Americans today who could endure seven hours of talk? or five? or three? Especially without pictures of any kind? Second, these audiences must have had an equally extraordinary capacity to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally. (45)

What are the implications for public discourse of a written, or typographic, metaphor? What is the character of its content? What does it demand of the public? What uses of the mind does it favor? (49)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America. (51)

Indeed, the history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered, all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment. (58)

Almost anywhere one looks int he eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then, one finds the resonances of the printed word and, in particular, its inextricable relationship to all forms of public expression. (62)

Thoreau, as it turned out, was precisely correct. He grasped that the telegraph would create its own definition of discourse; that it would not only permit but insist upon a conversation between Maine and Texas; and that it would require the content of that conversation to be different from what Typographic Man was accustomed to.

The value of telegraphy is undermined by applying the tests of permanence, continuity or coherence. The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)

We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology. (78)

Television has become, so to speak, the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible residue of the electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture that we no longer hear its faint hissing in the background or see the flickering gray light. This, in turn, means that its epistemology goes largely unnoticed. (79)

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. (84)

If on television, credibility replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude. (102)

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville. (105)

And so, we move rapidly into an information environment which may rightly be called trivial pursuit. As the game of that name uses facts as a source of amusement, so do our sources of news. It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides. (113)

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