Amusing Ourselves to Death

The proposition of the book, to study the impact of television on the population, the public discourse, the general way of expressing oneself, ... is really interesting. I must admit I never envisioned technology's impacts like this and it made me think quite a lot.

Unfortunately I think the book falls a bit short by half of it and start to repeat itself in a loop without bringing anything new to its first proposal. I would also have liked to have the author advice on the propagation of computers, smartphones and Internet, because as the book is quite old already, it misses the evolution of computers and them not just being "data treatment machines".

Still a great book to realize the impact television had on our politics, our daily life, the way we teach and envision the world. Gave me a lot to think about.

"Television has achieved the status of “meta-medium”—an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well."

I can only imagine what Neil Postman would say about smart phones and apps.

Prescient.

It's a thought provoking read. At times, Postman sounds extremely out of touch with reality. Then again, that's kind of his point – that reality is changing and not necessarily in a good way.

I appreciate him adding the caveat at the end of the book that we do not have to reach his conclusions, what is important is that we ask the questions.

I liked this book, it was short but very informative. Was recommended to me by an old college professor who was a big Frye fan. I would also recommend this book.

Foretelling and lives beyond the time it was written. I don't agree will all of the conclusions reached but it is worth a read.

The essential guide to the end times. Postman was an incisive critic of American media and society...and he inspired Roger Waters' best solo album.

A visionary. Although the whole idea could have been conveyed through an essay.

It took me five months to finish it. This book needed an editor to cut it down to 60 pages. Too long and not entertaining except for chapter 7, “Now... This.”

The before-television part could've been summarized in 20 pages at most. The whole typography chapter could've been mentioned in a half-line.

The author spent a lot of time analyzing sub-topics; it took him half the book to get into the main topic, and then he wasted it on giving many examples to support his points when just one or two examples would've been sufficient.

Another changed my life type of book. Still SO relevant today. Highly recommend.

Reading this book on the media of TV 35+ years after its publication, one might expect the arguments to be dated but they read more like a history than a polemic. The book's central argument about what can be lost in the transition from print media to screen ring true. Simultaneously, Postman speaks negatively about computers, unable to predict the mini renaissance of the written word that they induced and sadly peaked in Web 2.0 which certainly benefited my cohort. Yet that was a temporary modality before the next generation and supporting broadband enabled video media to consume the literal and figurative bandwidth with the same entertainment driving force that TV brought in the century prior. So, it was with that background that I heard his debates and nodded my head with the post-modern media reality of both disinformation and drivel. Both televised politics and religion are worse for the decades in this medium. Education, his third key area, I am less convinced on. Importantly, some of the fundamentals have shifted. The technology has had a democratizing effect and media gatekeepers have been upended. Individual streamers, vloggers, and channel managers are living in the paradox of the entertainment drift of their media and aren't universally making the same choices although many surely have engaged the “sell out”. Others have not. They are not beholden to shareholders. Market share is no longer a zero sum game with fixed channels and time slots. Truly weird things can and do thrive (e.g. ASMR). Discerning viewers can cultivate very different feeds than others. Let me know if anyone has more contemporary critiques in the legacy of McLuhan and Postman.