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Amusing Ourselves to Death

Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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About this listen

 In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think.

As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television. And because television is a visual medium, whose images are most pleasurably apprehended when they are fast-moving and dynamic, discourse on television has little tolerance for argument, hypothesis, or explanation. Postman argues that public discourse, the advancing of arguments in logical order for the public good, once a hallmark of American culture, is being converted from exposition and explanation to entertainment.

©1985 Neil Postman (P)1994 Blackstone Audio Inc. Elections & Political Process Entertainment & Performing Arts Film & TV History & Criticism Media Studies Politics & Government Social Sciences Thought-Provoking Funny

Critic reviews

"A brilliant, powerful and important book....This is a brutal indictment Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one." (Washington Post Book World)
"[Postman] starts where Marshall McLuhan left off, constructing his arguments with the resources of a scholar and the wit of a raconteur." (Christian Science Monitor)
"A sustained, withering and thought-provoking attack on television and what it is doing to us....Postman goes further than other critics in demonstrating that television represents a hostile attack on literate culture." (Publishers Weekly)
All stars
Most relevant
Interesting, still somewhat relevant on the internet age but to copy other reviews the narrator needs to slow down and actually care about what he's reading. Listen to it at .9 or .95 and he sounds more normal, although still somehow monotone.

Interesting, listen at .95 speed.

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Dispute its age this book is as relevant today as it was when it was first published, replace TV with the internet or incoming meta verse and you have a profound warning to wake up and spread the word.

My only gripe is the narration, it’s awful and very fast. Allows none of the points to land and carries all the emotion of captain Spock, probably better to get the print version as I know I will.

Read very robotically but great content

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Written for the times of television but a more useful an analysis of today

a hugely prescient book

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This book provides an uncomfortable but accurate analysis of how TV has transformed our culture.

Sobering

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TV will kill your brain, make you a puppet and charge you for the privilege. This book explores the changes from aural to printed to TV and how each has modified the world around us. Exposing the motivation behind learning, information and education and developing rational explanations of them puts critical to trying to understand life today.

Wake up world

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