If you have not read Neil Postman’s, Amusing Ourselves to Death, it’s not too late, but don’t put it off. If you love TV, you must read it now before you’re completely brain-dead. If you still watch TV, but it irritates you to no end, then you probably have foresight into Postman’s argument. If you abandoned TV years ago, then Postman will bolster your sagacity with a host of historical, philosophical, anthropological, and sociological insights. Whichever category you fit in to, the time has come to read Postman.
As an example of what you’ll be learning, here’s Postman’s analysis of what is required of the reader during the act of reading…
“Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is demanded of you as you read this book. You are required, first of all, to remain more or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this (with this or any other book), our culture may label you as anything from hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some sort of intellectual deficiency. The printing press makes rather stringent demands on our bodies as well as our minds. Controlling your body, however, is only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely thought to be stupid. If you have learned how to get to meanings without aesthetic distraction, you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes you bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an “immunity to eloquence,” meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author’s attitude toward the subject and toward the reader. You must in other words, know the difference between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality of an argument, you must be able to do several things at once, including delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished, holding in mind questions until you have determined where, when or if the text answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your relevant experience as counterargument to what is being proposed. You must also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and experience which, in fact, do not have a bearing on the argument. And in preparing yourself to do all of this, you must have divested yourself of the belief that words are magical and, above all, have learned to negotiate the world of abstractions, for there are very few phrases and sentences in this book that require you to call forth concrete images. In a print culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.”
Maybe you’ve stopped to consider what reading requires of you, but before Postman, I never had. The above quote is one of my favorites, and there are others, but the richness of Amusing Ourselves to Death is actually not found in its quotability, but in the awareness that the reader receives of the general trends of culture around him, and how “show business” is pushing public discourse. It’s good stuff.
Here’s a link to purchase it on Amazon.<>
