Your comment makes me think that we have criminalized and squashed entertaining but obviously political writing out of existence :-) . Say that somebody writes to make certain ideas more visible. For example, somebody wants people to buy the idea that amusing oneself to death is what we do (the book you mentioned). Somebody else perhaps has found that we are chronically depressed and cynic, when instead we should be thinking that a dead death itself is a fine trophy to hang on the wall during the march of progress[^1]. You can a) decide that you are set on your ways, thus entertainment…
Read "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. You will realize that Social Media is designed in such a way intentionally to draw toxicity from society. No technology is neutral. Technology gives and technology takes away. Medium is the message. Communication evolved because of the medium. For every evolution, it gives something and it takes away something. From oral communication to the printing press to telegraph to TV to the internet to social media. Every evolution gives birth to something and destroys something. For example, TV makes everyone reachable (what it gives), but makes…
First of all, I would like to focus on the post/idea itself but not the author. Accusing an idea is less sound because of one's judgement of the author makes little sense to me. A lot of the comments on this thread talks about "social skills", "learning from people", etc. But reading books itself is a way of communicating with people over space and time. If you focus on the efficiency and ROI, reading classic books will probably inspire you more than talking to a random person at a party. The OP's complaint about "mindless conversations about the news" seems justified in my opinion. Amusing…
Attention = Time + Consciousness Way more valuable than time or money. This is why people(especially buddhists) say to "be present in the moment". Attention management is crucial in being able to find meaning in today's society. Neil Postman did a good job regarding Huxley's warning to the world. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034.Amusing_Ourselves_... There's even some unique ideas like Zombies in Western Culture which talk about our lack of meaning and insatiability of consuming others "brains": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35523766-zombies-in-west...
Here's another interesting excerpt, from Neil Postman's "Amusing ourselves to death": As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was…
I believe he discussed it at some point in, it must have been How to Watch the TV News or one of his talks. I screened my copy of Technopoly, Entertaining Ourselves to Death, and The Disappearance of Childhood. If I recall correctly he expected it would follow a similar trajectory to TV. And by far and large I would tend to agree, in fact I recall agreeing with whatever assessment he had made and being in awe with his prescience — this was in 2021. As far as ChatGPT, perhaps this excerpt of the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death* written by his son may pique your interest; "Amusing…
I think Postman might have liked a more interactive medium for entertainment. So the idea of having a Socratic discussion with ChatGPT rather than passively watching TV, where the program flits from "10 people dead in mass shooting" to "and now this... a Corgi that barks on key!" But I'm thinking more of the immediate adoption of ChatGPT and similar tools to generate writing. What I took away from "Amusing Ourselves to Death" as a primary concern was the effects on discourse and thinking. I need to re-read (well, re-re-re-read) AoTD because Postman's central theme was about the population…
If you consider AOTD mostly about types of media, and how each media has effects on our society, then I think it clearly applies to chatGTP. These AI bots are becoming a Nee form of media that we interact with. I’m not sure what Postman would say about them though. It may be too early to understand how people engage with them. Postman preferred newspaper to tv, since the former encouraged deeper thinking and the latter was focused on appearance and emotion. ChatGTP can encourage one to dive into a subject. On the other hand, Postman made a big example of how a society based on newspapers was…
Sounds reasonable, and worth nothing that TV's dominant use case is entertainment, whereas it is ChatGPT's minority use case. ChatGPT is less applicable to _Amusing Ourselves To Death_ and most applicable to his _Technopoly_ book. Taken straight from Wikipedia: > This is exemplified, in Postman's view, by the computer, the "quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect" technology for a technopoly. It establishes sovereignty over all areas of human experience based on the claim that it "'thinks' better than we can". In the computer age Postman experienced, the IBM database system was the…
Neil's idea was that all of us should become aware of the environments we live in and how our brain/minds are genetically disposed to accommodate to them without our being very aware of the process, and, most importantly, winding up almost completely unaware of what we've accommodated to by winding up at a "new normal". The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science "The world is not as it seems". Here, it's "As a human being I'm a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress". Getting aware of how useful cravings for…