In Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis tells the story about how he got into Wall Street because of the money, but when he was interviewed, he committed the error of admitting so. Apparently, it was faux pas to give “money” as the reason for wanting to be in f inance, you were supposed to be in … Read more
The earliest instance of this quote is found in Virgil‘s Aeneid: “facilis descensus Averno” (the descent to hell is easy). Fundamentally, it is a quote about inadvertent error – consider cases in which you acted with good intent, but found yourself opposing people in your struggle, or think of times in which you had the backing of … Read more
In 1985, Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. The book is a criticism of television and its effect on society. Postman argues that TV has dumbed down public discourse, making it more entertainment-focused and less informative. Postman criticizes the effects of television on … Read more
Chapter 11: The Huxleyan Warning Our world has any prison-cultures who have structures similar to what Orwell describes. If one were to read both 1984 and Animal Farm, and then for good measure, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, one would have a fairly precise blueprint of the machinery of thought-control as it currently operates in … Read more
Chapter 10: Teaching as an amusing activity Reading books and watching television differ completely in what they imply about learning. America is a case in point of what can be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education. The first was in fifth century B.C, when Athens transformed from an oral culture to … Read more
Chapter 9: Reach out to elect someone By bringing together in compact form all of the arts of show business—music, drama, imagery, humor, celebrity—the television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand Postman’s point here, it is useful to remember that capitalism, like science … Read more
Chapter 7: Now… This I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in … Read more
Chapter 5: The Age of Show Business The supra-ideology for all television conversation is entertainment. No matter what is depicted, the main presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. When news shows provide us with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the news anchors to “join them tomorrow.” … Read more
Chapter 4: The Peekaboo World Newspapers came to depend not on the quality or usefulness of their news, but on how much and at what speed they provided it. James Bennett of the New York Herald boasted that his paper contained 79,000 words of telegraphic content in the first week of 1848. Information is important … Read more
Chapter 3: Typographic America The Bible was the central reading matter in all households – Protestants shared Luther’s belief that printing was “God’s highest and extremest act of Grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.” But these people did not just read the Bible or religious books, they read many nonreligious books. … Read more