Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Postman states his thesis in this first chapter, that during the latter half of the 20th century, the Age of Television replaced the Age of Typography. This is his way of saying that style has replaced substance. Postman gives many examples of people whose professions indicate a certain gravitas that now radiate entertainment above all—such as newscasters, politicians, and theologians. At the time of the book’s writing, Postman notes that the president of the United States was former actor Ronald Reagan.

Many contemporary figures have written about the decline of American discourse, but Postman argues that the genesis of the problem was addressed by Plato more than two millennia ago. The Greek philosopher stated that how people communicate affects what they communicate. To illustrate this, Postman notes that smoke signals are limited in what kind of discourse they can transmit. Plato’s own discipline of philosophy would be impossible to express using this method. In the modern age, what we frame as the national or world “news of the day” only became possible with the invention of the telegraph—a means of sending information across great distances very fast. He calls the news “a figment of our technological imagination” (8) because it exists only due to a form of technology. Before this, information took time to travel, and people only knew of events in their local vicinities.

This distribution of news is essentially what professor and media critic Marshall McLuhan captures in his famous dictum, “The medium is the message” (10). Postman alters this phrase for his book, substituting “metaphor” for “message.” The latter is a statement of reality, while the former (media-metaphors) create a specific form of reality with subtle implications. For example, a clock is more than just a device for telling time—it creates the concept of time as one moment passes to the next. It removes time from human events, making people less attuned to natural markers of time like the sun and seasons. It thus affects how we perceive time, though most remain unaware of this.

The alphabet is another kind of technology that permanently altered how we communicate. Writing makes words permanent so others can provide criticism. This allows for deeper forms of discourse like philosophy, science, and history. All technology thus changes our way of thinking. For example, memorization is no longer necessary in writing as it was in oral culture. Postman argues that in every new tool resides an idea that supersedes its function; for example, eyeglasses imply that the body (as separate from the mind) can be altered and is no longer dependent on fate. Media contain their own ideas and dictate our language. In other words, forms of communication alter our way of thinking and thus the content of culture.

In this chapter, Postman makes the case that the medium used to convey information shapes the information. He reiterates that media are not inherently bad, but objects to television being regarded as a serious means of communication. Epistemology, or the “origins and nature of knowledge” (17), is affected by the form of media. This is because every medium has a bias: The very nature of truth depends on how a culture agrees to determine it. Postman applies literary critic Northrup Frye’s idea of resonance to media. Resonance is imbuing something with a greater meaning than the thing itself. Likewise, a medium takes on greater meaning than its original context: “It sometimes has the power to become implicated in our concepts of piety, or goodness, or beauty. And it is always implicated in the ways we define and regulate our ideas of truth” (18).

A traditional culture based on oral rather than written communication would naturally place greater weight on proverbs, as speech is the means of communication. This culture would attempt to find truth in a court of law by seeking a proverb that satisfies both parties. In a culture dependent on writing, however, this seems childish and simplistic. In an American court, no judge would accept an argument that is not grounded in a written document. However, Postman points out that there are still aspects of modern culture which rely on older oral forms of information. Within the text-based court, testimony is still given orally; text-heavy places such as universities still rely on oral defenses for doctoral dissertations. Postman’s argument is that truth must always be given in the manner expected in one’s culture.

That said, Postman believes that some forms of finding truth are better than others. His goal in this book is to convince readers that a print-based epistemology is better than a television-based one—making the decline of the former a cause for concern. Changing the dominant medium means changing our idea of truth. Postman ends with three points: His argument is not dependent on the idea that a change in medium means a change in cognitive capacity (i.e., “television makes one dumb”), though he’s inclined to believe this; shifts in epistemology are not comprehensive (speech and writing still exist and always will); and his argument pertains to public discourse only, as there are benefits to television in terms of entertainment and company for the housebound.

The third chapter’s thesis is that America was devoted to the printed word from its very founding. In the 17th century, the literacy rate of men in Colonial America was around 90 percent and that of women close to 60 percent. The earliest settlers of New England were devoutly religious, so the Bible was central to their lives. Postman identifies three other reasons for this devotion, starting with the fact that New Englanders were likely drawn from the most literate areas of England or the more literate strata among the English people. This is because the literacy rate of English men stood at no more that 40 percent at the time. Secondly, from 1650 on, most New England towns had laws mandating some kind of public schooling. Thirdly, the colonists’ literary culture came fully formed from England, removing a “need to print their own books or even nurture their own writers” (33). This meant that no literary centers in the colonies could foster elitism; reading was for everyone.

This last point can be illustrated by the phenomenal success of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense. To say that all classes devoured his work hardly does it justice. In the pamphlet’s first two months, it sold the equivalent of eight million copies (relative population-wise) in 1985 (the year Postman’s book was published). Beyond this initial period, the pamphlet’s total sales at the time were the equivalent of a book selling 24 million copies in 1985. It essentially held Americans’ attention to the same degree as the Super Bowl.

Contributing to the reign of the printed word was the printing press’s early introduction to American colonies. The first printing press in America could be found at Harvard University in 1638; soon afterward, others were available in both Boston and Philadelphia. By the end of the 1700s, over 180 newspapers had been established. Another popular outlet was the pamphlet, perhaps the most famous being the Federalist Papers, a series of 85 essays debating the terms of the new Constitution in 1787-1788. The Federalist Papers were originally published in newspapers but found a brisk market when reprinted in pamphlet form.

In the 19th century, mechanics and apprentices’ libraries became wildly popular—another sign of the democratic nature of literary culture. When postal rates were reduced in 1851, printed material sent by mail helped spur the popularity of newspapers, periodicals, and cheap books. Novels were also wildly popular, propelling the careers of authors like Charles Dickens. Another institution that aided reading culture was the lecture hall. Almost every town had one and hosted a variety of speakers. An adult education program known as the Lyceum Movement helped spur this phenomenon. People of all backgrounds wished to hear the popular authors and intellectuals of the day.

Postman argues that the dominance of the printed word was due in large part to print having a monopoly on communication. There was simply nothing to compete with it, as it existed before radio, television, and all forms of recording. The printed word influenced the way people communicated, as they adopted the linear, analytical quality of writing in other modes of communication such as discussions and sermons. The printing press thus dictated the form communication took, a fact noted by philosopher Karl Marx who said the press killed off the kind of storytelling that produced Homer’s Odyssey because it changed the structure of communication.

In this chapter, Postman discusses the type of person who is able to be fully immersed in a life dominated by typography. He begins with examples from the famous debates between politicians Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the 1850s. The first debate lasted seven hours in a single day, beginning with a three-hour opening argument by Douglas. Postman explains that the debates’ audience consisted of the grandchildren of the Founding Fathers, who represented the apex of the Age of Typography—and print demands rational thought.

To illustrate this need for rational thought, Postman turns to religion. The New England colonies were founded by pilgrims seeking religious freedom for everyone, which—if they were free to choose—implies that reason alone could be used to win people over. Deism flourished, a branch of Christianity with a heavy dose of reason, which held that after God created the universe, he left it to develop naturally. The leading religious figures of the day were all deeply intellectual and argued for their specific strain of religion along organized, rational lines. Postman calls theologian Jonathan Edwards “one of the most brilliant and creative minds ever produced by America” (54). Arguing about doctrine happened in tandem with the founding of colleges. Many leading American colleges were established by various denominations during the 18th-19th centuries.

The Age of Typography’s influence can also be seen in the legal world of the 19th century. Legal education was thought to require a certain liberalism so lawyers had a well-rounded perspective based on the classics and legal theory. Again, reason and well-articulated arguments were the coin of the realm. Even in the commercial world of advertising, Postman claims there is evidence of print’s influence. Buyers were assumed to be “literate, rational, analytical” (58) and advertisements were crafted accordingly, with wording meant to inform and persuade rather than appeal to passions. Only at the turn of the 20th century were images and slogans introduced, shifting the focus to aesthetics and psychology.

The act of reading itself was a different endeavor compared to modern day. Reading once provided the only access to ideas and information, and public figures were known by their words more than anything else. The opposite is the case today, as most famous people bring to mind an image rather than anything they’ve written or said. Leisure was once scarce, so reading had a special, almost sacred, nature to it, and it was assumed American democracy relied on the literacy of its citizens. Postman calls this period the Age of Exposition.

This chapter describes how the Age of Exposition was supplanted by the Age of Show Business. Two factors played key roles in this. The first was that transportation and communication became separated. Prior to this, information could only travel as fast as transportation itself. But by the 1840s, Samuel Morse and others made the telegraph the standard equipment of newspapers—forever changing the distribution of information.

The news before this change focused on local events that were relevant to people’s everyday lives. Philosopher Henry David Thoreau sarcastically wrote in Walden that the telegraph being built under the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and America might result in the pressing news “that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough” (65). Information thus became decontextualized and irrelevant. People rarely changed their actions based on this new information because it didn’t pertain to them; what Postman calls the “information-action ratio” became much smaller. This new information was largely incoherent not only because of the speed at which it was conveyed but the speed at which it was replaced. In rapid succession, “[f]acts push other facts into and then out of consciousness” (70) before deep comprehension can take place.

At the same time, photography was becoming popular. From the start, people spoke of it as a kind of language, but Postman argues there are fundamental differences between photography and language. Photography can only represent the particular; that is, it shows one concrete object or a fragment of a larger object. It can never represent an abstract idea the way language can, except insofar as language itself is used to connect an image and an idea. Photographs also have no “syntax, which deprives it of a capacity to argue with the world” (72). There’s nothing ambiguous about them that requires interpretation—they just record reality. Words require context for meaning, but photographs don’t. Postman is quick to note that images predate words; the mechanical production of images is what changed the information landscape and even reality itself.

Around the same time this shift occurred, crossword puzzles became popular. This is no coincidence, as it is an example of a pseudo-context, created solely to provide entertainment through random bits of information. The Age of Exposition didn’t disappear overnight, having had a final burst of brilliance at the beginning of the 20th century, but the stage was set for its demise. Soon, a new “peek-a-boo” world would emerge in which events popped up for a quick turn in the limelight before ending abruptly. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it tends to overwhelm public discourse rather than remain amusement. The shift to the Age of Show Business was ushered in by television. This “peek-a-boo” trend has touched every aspect of society, shaping them with its biases. Television’s dominance is so complete that the debate as to whether it shapes or reflects our culture is unnecessary—because it is our culture.