Amusing Ourselves to Death
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
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Amusing Ourselves to Death
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Narrated by:
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Jeff Riggenbach
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Written by:
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Neil Postman
About this listen
As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television. And because television is a visual medium, whose images are most pleasurably apprehended when they are fast-moving and dynamic, discourse on television has little tolerance for argument, hypothesis, or explanation. Postman argues that public discourse, the advancing of arguments in logical order for the public good, once a hallmark of American culture, is being converted from exposition and explanation to entertainment.
©1985 Neil Postman (P)1994 Blackstone Audio Inc.What the critics say
"A brilliant, powerful and important book....This is a brutal indictment Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one." (Washington Post Book World)
"[Postman] starts where Marshall McLuhan left off, constructing his arguments with the resources of a scholar and the wit of a raconteur." (Christian Science Monitor)
"A sustained, withering and thought-provoking attack on television and what it is doing to us....Postman goes further than other critics in demonstrating that television represents a hostile attack on literate culture." (Publishers Weekly)
What listeners say about Amusing Ourselves to Death
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Jeff Alpaugh
- 2022-10-15
A must read to understand our culture
I am fascinated in understanding how and why our culture has devolved.
How did we have the strongest citizens and the best civilization and now we have the weakest citizens, our society is crumbling and we are all completely apathetic about it? A key part of the answer is found in this book. Very tight and potent.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- Anonymous User
- 2023-11-03
Essential
Impossible to fully grasp our current state of being without this framework.
Terrifyingly prescient
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- Amazon Customer
- 2020-07-06
must read
amazing and easy to listen to! the book is eye opening and highly relevant even today.
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- Kelly Hannigan
- 2020-12-01
Ahead of His Time
Published in 1985, this book serves as a critique on how the introduction, and mass adoption, of television reshaped not only how information was disseminated, but what kind of information would prove relevant in the television age.
Maybe most important is that in 2020, the form of postman's critique can also be applied to the new paradigm of social media specifically, and the attention economy generally.
In a play on Marshall McLuhan's observation that "the medium is the message", Postman writes that "the medium is the metaphor" - in other words, the medium becomes a reflection of the culture. A sobering thought in the age of likes, viral content, hot takes, and decontextualized information.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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- cadiddleheart
- 2022-03-03
Narration was very fast.
I found the book interesting and insightful. I understood it best when I set the playback at X .8.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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- Amazon Customer
- 2020-12-24
It’s dated but no less relevant to today
The basics of his ideas are wildly more applicable today that he ever would have realised. Was a great book.
Not a great fan of the reader, it comes across a little like the “announcer” voice, or like an ad read guy. Would have been nicer for someone more connected to the material to have done it. Books read by their authors are so much better
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- Jamie Paterson
- 2022-07-03
Brave New World vs 1984
This book expressed a lot of my feelings that we will sooner be in a Huxley world than an Orwell world. It is shocking when you switch “television” for “social media” when he speaks. A great book that is proving to be more timeless although good to have the context that it is written decades ago.
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- Jorawar
- 2023-01-16
Information is the gun powder
Brilliant look at TV from the eyes of Neil Postman in 1986. Thank You sir
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- Anonymous User
- 2023-02-14
10/10
Amazing. Haunting in the worst ways but very much a great analysis on contemporary life
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- Chuck W.
- 2024-02-10
Absolutely brilliant
Scary, thought-provoking, and brilliant. I would recommend this to anyone. Narrator also did a fine job.
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