A 1992 album cover:
The 2015 remastered album cover:
These albums were a reference to author and educator Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves To Death published in 1985.
In less than 200 pages, the flash of its razor-sharp literary blade makes paper snowflakes of any notion that how we consume media is neutral to the medium.
Postman writes:
To take a simple example of what this means, consider the primitive technology of smoke signals. While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical arguments. Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.
This is Andrew Postman’s (Neil’s son) foreword from the 20th-anniversary edition:
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well-known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warned that we would be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. 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 right.
Neil died in October 2003.
6 months after Friendster launched.
2 months after MySpace launched.
40 months before the iPhone launched.
It is impossible to read this book and not want to have a seance where you re-incarnate Neil at least as @NeilPostman or NeilPostman.Substack to hear him describe what we have become.
It’s true that he embodies this:
But when I say I don't necessarily agree with everything in a speculative argument when I am spotted 40 years of hindsight is to grade it on a curve where Postman still earns an enduring A.
It provokes. It’s well-written.
From Wikipedia, here are 2 other cultural references to the book:
Postman's concept of the "information-action ratio" was referenced in the Arctic Monkeys song "Four Out of Five" off the band's 2018 album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, where the Information Action Ratio is the name of a fictional taqueria on the moon.
In a 2019 interview with Kjersti Flaa, comic and actor Zach Galifianakis references Amusing Ourselves to Death with the line "you will stop hearing the term 'big brother' because we will do it to ourselves." Galifianakis employed the quotation in response to a question the interviewer asked about whether or not he uses social media, to which he replied with a denunciation of the negative effects of the internet on society in general.
You can find my condensed as well as unabridged notes/highlights here.
Stay groovy ☮️
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Have you listened to Tristan Harris’ interview with Tim Ferriss? He references the same Postman quote. That interview really changed how I view social media and my relationship with it.
Amusing is top shelf reading for understanding modernity, media and what comes after. I discovered it 2011. *Mediated* has similar vibes. While we are at it throw in Sherry Turkle to talk about how we deal with each other in the face of technology