Put This Must-Read Book at the Top of Your Reading List!

Here’s a Sneak Peek into One of the Best Books I Have Ever Read

In 1985, Neil Postman, a professor at New York University, wrote a short book that is now considered a classic. Amusing Ourselves to Death: A Prophetic Examination of What Watching Screens Does to Us delves into the change that happens to our minds and how we experience and evaluate the world around us when we digest information from screens. Remember, he wrote this when the only screens we had in our lives were televisions!

Postman does an incredibly deep and historical dive into the previous 500-plus years of assimilating knowledge through the printed word. He then contrasts that way of learning, not only in schools but in life itself—whether the activity is assimilating news, being entertained, or following politics—with the difference in the way that screens and their programmed entertainment deliver information and, more importantly, knowledge. The takeaway is that the way we used to learn has been replaced by a far inferior method, so much so that it can’t even be called knowledge anymore. Rather, its proper name should be pieces of information or entertainment, always delivered in bits and nearly always delivered with a self-serving agenda. 

In 2005, 20 years after Postman first published his book, his son Andrew republished it. (Neil Postman had died 2 years earlier.) Andrew Postman added a preface saying that cell phones and laptops had significantly advanced this worrisome situation. Keep in mind, his view was 2 years before Apple launched the iPhone and the age of smartphones and tablets began! We have traveled far down the road that Postman predicted, and the world and people have completely changed as a result of this “advancement,” just as he predicted. As far as I can see, everything he wrote and predicted has come true, on steroids!

I can’t tell you how thrilling (yes, thrilling, welcome to my world) it was for me to read this book and finally understand how we have mostly become a society of gossip, misinformation, and tidbits of information that are not connected to anything, have no context, or have no salient point. Rather than learn something new and ask questions about where it fits into our culture or environment or the world at large, “TV life,” according to Postman, (and “screen life” now) presents each discrete news bit as if it stands on its own, unrelated to anything. Think about TV or radio news items you hear or social media posts you read—so many conversations are just sharing bits of information, with little exchange of knowledge.

Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press well over 500 years ago, and for all that time most printed books and materials focused on conveying knowledge and exploring where the truth lies. For centuries, science, history, politics, psychology, and diverse works of fiction have been expressed in the written, typographic, printed word. Knowledge was valued and sought for its own sake.

According to Postman, all that changed in the 19th century, first with photography, then the telegraph (our first electronic communication system), and then with a significant increase in advertising in magazines and newspapers. This was followed by the vast expansion of broadcasting and programming in the 20th century, first in radio, then movies, then TV. This march of new broadcast media was firmly tied to making money, mainly through advertising. When you want to make money at something, you want as many people as possible to watch your program, so the programming necessarily needs to be pleasant, inoffensive, noncontroversial, and even dumbed down. And it must suit the advertisers’ agenda. This is still the case today. Virtually everything you watch or read online in order to learn information, whether it’s news, current events, or even health information, has an agenda, which is to be profitable at the end of the day. It’s all “entertainment” and packaged as such. The goal is always about selling you something, even if that is only getting you to click on a link from time to time or “like” them, so they can accumulate followers to increase audience size and attract sponsors, which is directly related to the goal of turning a profit.

Cut to Health and Quality of Life

In today’s world, life without screens is unthinkable. Smartphones are ubiquitous. I know people who are paying good money to go on retreats where phones and all other electronic devices are not allowed. Think about this—they are choosing to pay someone a lot of money just to disconnect! A couple of days ago I was on the New York City subway. Now that it is almost completely “wired” I was one of only a few people in a crowded subway car who wasn’t staring at my phone. Neil Postman would be turning in his grave if he could see how accurately he predicted the insatiability of screen media and what it would do to people’s mindset and attention span. The subway used to be a place of life, of human interaction, even if that was only a glance, a smile, or a shared grimace when someone was playing loud music. Not so anymore.

In another article, I explored some of the ways that aspects of modern life have become an obstacle to better health. The daily amount of screentime we devour is surely one of those aspects. Here are some issues that come to mind:

·      It robs us of human interaction.

·      It distances us from nature and the world around us. (Have you seen pedestrians almost get hit by a car because they were focused on their phone instead of their surroundings?)

·      It provides ready-made soundbites for conversation that bypass any opportunities for critical thinking and encourage us to develop opinions on our own.

·      It feeds us other peoples’ voices and opinions about what’s good for us, our health, and our lives rather than us doing the sometimes challenging work ourselves to find what works best for us. (Keep in mind that those voices are usually advertising messages or self-serving opinions.)

·      It encourages feelings of inadequacy, FOMO (fear of missing out), and other anxiety-causing feelings. Social media platforms and celebrity sites invite us to compare our “humdrum and unfulfilled” lives with the curated, unrealistic images of other people’s “perfect and exciting” lives.

Attention Boomers!

Chances are, if you are reading this, you are a Boomer or a Gen Zer. If so, you are, like me, one of the last generations that was educated primarily through the printed word. While I did watch TV while growing up, my education was firmly rooted in books. I have also been a voracious reader during much of my life, preferring printed books to electronic media. But it wasn’t until reading Postman’s book that I realized some of the underlying reasons that communication in the modern world sometimes seems so strange to me. I’m also realising that the modern world, from politics to business to religion to education, is largely shaped by the lack of knowledge that his predictions warned us against.

Amusing Ourselves to Deathis one of those books you can read in a day or two, and its affects will last the rest of your life. I can’t recommend it enough.