The late NYU professor Neil Postman examines the cultural shift from the printed word to electronic media as the preferred form of communication. More than another ‘TV will rot your brain’ diatribe, Amusing Ourselves to Death delves into how we perceive and consume information, formulate thoughts and arguments, and construct beliefs based on the technology we use. This classic cautionary tale points out what we are unknowingly sacrificing on the altar of entertainment. Not for the faint of heart.

Just about everyone is familiar with George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984. It’s a thought experiment about what life could be like under a repressive authoritarian regime that strictly censors free speech, monitors its citizens’ opinions and bars their access to information. In this world, people were imprisoned and tortured for the subtlest whisper of dissent.

There was a collective sigh of relief when the year 1984 came and went, and dark repressive dictatorship seemed out of sight. But there’s an older, more obscure dystopia that is equally disconcerting. In 1932, Aldous Huxley envisioned a Brave New World where people would not fear punishment, but fear being deprived of pleasure. In this world, truth would not be kept from citizens, but lost in the deluge of trivial facts and opinions. No need to ban and confiscate books, as no one would want to read them. This world wouldn’t need a Big Brother to deprive people of their freedom, history, or wisdom. People would not be enslaved to the state, but pathetically enslaved to self and its impulses. Given our cultural trajectory, Huxley’s prediction appears to be the more accurate of the two. The shift from a print-based culture to an image-based culture has fueled our descent into mindless triviality.

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For most of human history, people have relied on oral forms of communication. Information about ancestors and traditions came through village elders. Consider the Hebrews who faithfully told their children the story of Yahweh’s delivering his people from Egyptian slavery, or Homer, reciting Grecian histories of human and divine action to the next generation. With the advent of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440, however, the primary medium of communication gradually changed from the spoken word to the printed word as written materials became more accessible. Literacy rates rose rapidly during this time. The printed word would prove foundational to the Enlightenment, facilitating rational, propositional discourse in a way never before possible. 

With the advent of electronic media—particularly the television—came yet another monumental shift in the ways we communicate. With this change in medium came change in the way we take in information and form beliefs—and it was not a change for the better.

The forms of media we rely on to communicate are a matter of great importance. Some media can facilitate meaningful, precise discourse while others obscure the process of communication. For instance, what would happen if people tried to engage in a rigorous debate using smoke signals? It would be a slow, cumbersome process, full of ambiguity.  In the same way, it is also difficult to communicate meaning precisely through the use of images. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but which thousand words, exactly? If people were asked to choose a thousand words to depict a scene (they’re not), the thousand words would vary dramatically. Because the communication of those thousand words is implicit and not explicit, however, people are left with vague gut-level intuitions that they cannot express. This makes meaningful conversation and debate extremely difficult. Words form concrete truth claims that can be assessed and responded to with words. Arguing with images leads to ambiguities. It’s not a fair fight, and it’s one that leads to everyone losing.

Before television, there was no way to market anything like the “news of the day.” There were no media that allowed snippets of events of varying levels of significance to be ripped from their respective contexts at jaw-dropping speeds. Cultures that still rely on smoke signals as an efficient tool of communication will simply never have the “news of the day” phenomenon. As the late media theorist Marshall McLuhan observed, the medium is the message.

This means that the television is not simply a new technology, but a new way of thinking and knowing. The forms of communication generate the content of a culture. Image-driven forms of communication will create an entirely different culture than word-driven forms do—or did.

It would be wrong to say that television and electronic media have brought no benefit. The power of images to stir emotion toward noble causes like ending war and fighting racism, for instance, should not be dismissed. This is a discussion of tradeoffs, not a blanket assault on electronic media.

It is worth mentioning that this is not an elitist argument against the junk on television. There is plenty of junk in print as well as on television. The best measure of a culture is not its assortment of frivolities, but what a culture finds most important. When a culture deems frivolities important, that is problematic. As we get bombarded with a large volume of random scraps of unrelated information, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between the frivolous and the important, as news moves fluidly between political upheavals and celebrity gossip.

This critique is more about epistemology (theory of knowledge) than aesthetics. It’s about how certain media fail to help us know, even as they presume to convey information fully and effectively. As we transition from print-driven culture to image-driven culture, we become increasingly trivial. The image-based way of knowing is doing more harm than good. There are tradeoffs that come from any shift in communication medium, but it is not always an even exchange. The change from books to television has been unfavorable.

Print-based learning requires an ability to think abstractly and logically. It trains the mind to follow a line of reasoning and engage with ideas rather than passively consume them. It’s why asking, “Do I need to draw you a picture?” is received as patronizing and insulting. The implication is that the capacity to conceptualize and understand arguments without relying on images is preferable.

During the colonial era and through much of the 1800s, America was a thoroughly typographic (i.e., print-oriented) culture. Not only did colonial New England have the world’s highest literacy rates, they actually made the most of their literacy: they read. A lot. Alexis de Tocqueville and other observers of early America marveled that not just a tiny intellectual elite but even the poorest farmhand could eloquently express and defend his positions on political and spiritual topics.

Thomas Paine’s famous treatise Common Sense sold over 100,000 copies in the two months following its publication in 1776. Relative to the small population of colonists, this was a remarkable feat. The only media event of comparable magnitude in modern America is the Super Bowl, which draws in a similar proportion of the nation’s population. Which society would be better equipped to articulate and defend its rights and democratic institutions?

It was the centrality of the printed word that led to an educated citizenry and robust public discourse. Television will not lead us to either.

Educators are obsessed with talk of “techniques,” the newer implicitly accepted as the best. In this case, we see television supplementing or even replacing the printed word as a means of conveying information. Sesame Street as a perfect example of education—yet another vital institution getting subsumed by entertainment.

Sesame Street was a dream-come-true for parents and teachers. In a culture where children are often viewed as annoyances, the show gave parents a reprieve from the responsibility of caretaking and educating while alleviating them of any sense of guilt because the show was educational. Teachers love Sesame Street for similar reasons. Incorporating television into the curriculum was a new (and therefore improved) technique. At home and in the classroom, Sesame Street encourages a love of school and learning—or so people thought (and probably still think). As it turns out, Sesame Street teaches kids to expect fun from school, fun just like Sesame Street is fun.

Instead of learning about Mimi the Whale’s migration patterns and the behavior of large oceanic mammals, the implicit message communicated to children is that anything that is worth learning should also be entertaining in the process. That education needs entertainment.

Reading books and interacting with peers and teachers are active, engaging activities. Watching TV, by contrast, requires nothing from the viewer: it is passive and it pacifies.

To be clear, Sesame Street is educational, but only in the sense that any other show is educational: the viewer passively receives a steady stream of information. The biggest problem with Sesame Street is that it sells itself as a helpful aid to the classroom, when in fact it encourages children to love television—not school.

The Television Age has not left the classroom untouched. Its presence has weakened a longstanding connection between education and the printed word. If a culture hacks at the print-based roots, it will end up with a diminished, subpar yield of the fruits of a print-based education: the ability to use logic, follow arguments, maintain focus required to think critically, and, say, read a book. Not only has the television’s advent begun the dissolution of the bond between education and the printed word, it has also ushered in a new understanding of education itself, in which education is a passive experience and teachers are stage performers, charged with entertaining a crowd.

There are two paths that crush a culture’s spirit: the Orwellian path of statist authoritarianism or the Huxleyan path of Visigothic hedonism. There are reflections of the Orwellian vision that we see in American culture, like prisons filled to overflowing at alarming rates, but the 1984 narrative misses the mark at crucial junctures. The suffocation of a society’s spirituality, for example, need not come through outright suppression, as Orwell feared.

More than any other country in the world, the United States has given us the clearest picture of what the Huxleyan nightmare could look like. The Orwellian brand of bullying is easier to spot. When we hear the clink of shackles and howls of pain from the oppressed, we still take up the proud Enlightenment tradition of rebellion à la Bacon, Milton, Paine, and Jefferson. But howls of laughter don’t strike us as oppression, and thus rebellion seems unwarranted. To whom would one complain about weighty political discourse devolving into punch lines and laughter? And so amusement continues to be a high ideal, and television remains the preferred vehicle for discourse, speeding forward at an alarming rate. Intelligent, rational discourse about the subjects that matter most are impossible via electronic, image-driven forms of communication.

It doesn’t seem like an ideology in its own right, and yet it is, in that it shapes the way that we view and interact with the world: the television paradigm insists on a particular way of life, particular patterns in which people relate to each other and to ideas. It’s been a cultural revolution without bloodshed, but it’s also occurred without any debate. We Americans are all hopelessly Marxist in the sense that we all intuitively believe that history is moving towards progress as a matter of course and that technology is the conduit by which paradise on earth will be ushered in.

The challenge here is that many people do not consider the current state of affairs problematic. For those who do, there is the additional challenge of finding a viable solution. The Luddite proposals for getting rid of electronic media altogether are unfeasible and absurd. The idea of a documentary series would dissolve into parody and self-defeat.

Awareness is perhaps the best defense: knowledge that image-based communication is an entirely different structure of receiving meaning that ultimately corrodes our notions of political discourse, religion, commerce, and quality news reporting.

Cultivating awareness must begin in the schools. Schools must begin discussing and demystifying media, showing its effects on individuals and a culture. It’s a long shot, but education is the best way to outpace disaster. As Huxley pointed out, the problem is not in laughter replacing thinking, but that we no longer know why we’re laughing or why we’ve abandoned thinking.

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