What has television done to us? A look back at the eras that led up to the TV generation shows the rise and fall of many communication technologies; the most recent being television. Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, is about the underrated significance of one technology replacing another. Postman accomplishes this by providing perspectives from history, touching on technology and waking the reader to the changing world around them.To summarize chapter one and two, Postman believes that television is responsible for a negative trend in America’s public discourse.
According to Postman, the change in technology to television has brought forth photogenic leaders in our country. Postman captured this by saying, "As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor. Postman writes that each medium allows a different way to orient public discourse (10). As one media takes over another, the stars of the media begin to change as well.According to Postman, to gain a proper perspective it’s better to see the significance of old technologies.
Postman uses the example of the clock to illustrate how technology can change a culture saying, with the clock we have "learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons". He goes on to explain that even something as overlooked as a clock had a significant effect on how God was perceived. This change was in the past and we have long forgotten the groans of that transition.He then touched on the introduction of the alphabet and then writing saying that “writing freezes speech” (Postman 12). How do we know what is real and what is fiction? What if a known source of truth begins to become corrupt, like news outlets or learning channels? Each era of time had their way of communicating and all had a distortion. Postman notes this by saying "the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression".
This is something to monitor, but people may never believe it to be true.Postman introduces how a tribe in western Africa settles disputes with no way of referencing written thoughts, and then he compares it to how lawyers would handle legal disputes today citing the difference in how truth is viewed. Postman applied how truth is achieved in a culture where “seeing is believing”. The idea that not all TV programming is bad can be dangerous. It’s alarming that not many seem to take television seriously.
We all watch TV and if it's on the computer it's still the same communication Postman was referring to.Television has grown to be a popular part of who we are and it is difficult to have a serious talk about the consequences of this technology. Postman introduces this unpopular argument slowly and methodically. The first two chapters set the stage for the book by waking readers up to the technologies around them. As television begins to become our reality, Postman tells the reader that we need to understand how truth is validated with this new technology of communication.
