Table Of ContentTable of Contents
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Foreword
Part I.
Chapter 1. - The Medium Is the Metaphor
Chapter 2. - Media as Epistemology
Chapter 3. - Typographic America
Chapter 4. - The Typographic Mind
Chapter 5. - The Peek-a-Boo World
Part II.
Chapter 6. - The Age of Show Business
Chapter 7. - “Now ... This”
Chapter 8. - Shuffle Off to Bethlehem
Chapter 9. - Reach Out and Elect Someone
Chapter 10. - Teaching as an Amusing Activity
Chapter 11. - The Huxleyan Warning
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acclaim for Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to
Death
“As a fervent evangelist of the age of Hollywood, I publicly opposed Neil
Postman’s dark picture of our media-saturated future. But time has proved
Postman right. He accurately foresaw that the young would inherit a frantically
all-consuming media culture of glitz, gossip, and greed.”
—Camille Paglia
“A brillant, powerful and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has
laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.”
—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World
“He starts where Marshall McLuhan left off, constructing his arguments with the
resources of a scholar and the wit of a raconteur.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“This comes along at exactly the right moment.... We must confront the
challenge of his prophetic vision.”
—Jonathan Kozol
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
For the last third of the twentieth century, Neil Postman was one of America’s
foremost social critics and education and communications theorists, and his
ideas and accessibility won him an international following. An influential and
revered teacher, he was professor for more than forty years at New York
University, where he founded the renowned Media Ecology program. Blessed
with an unusually far-reaching mind, he authored more than twenty books,
producing major works on education (Teaching as a Subversive Activity, The
End of Education), childhood (The Disappearance of Childhood), language
(Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk), news (How to Watch TV News, with Steve Powers)
and technology’s impact on culture (Technopoly). Amusing Ourselves to Death
remains his most reverberating and widely read book, translated into more than a
dozen languages. He was educated at the State University of New York at
Fredonia and Columbia University. He died in October 2003, at the age of
seventy-two.
Andrew Postman, Neil’s son, is the author of five books, including the novel
Now I Know Everything. For several years he was a monthly columnist for
Glamour and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington
Post, and New York Magazine, among numerous publications.
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1985
Published in Penguin Books 1986
This edition with an introduction by Andrew Postman published 2006
Copyright © Neil Postman, 1985
Introduction copyright © Andrew Postman, 2005
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The New York Times Company for permission to reprint from
“Combining TV, Books, Computers” by Edward Fiske, which appeared in the August 7, 1984 issue of The
New York Times. Copyright © 1984 by The New York Times Company.
A section of this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg Scholars Program, Annenberg
School of Communications, University of Southern California. Specifically, portions of chapters six and
seven formed part of a paper delivered at the Scholars Conference, “Creating Meaning: Literacies of our
Time,” February 1984.
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Introduction to the Twentieth Anniversary
Edition
Now this?
A book of social commentary published twenty years ago? You’re not busy
enough writing e-mails, returning calls, downloading tunes, playing games
(online, PlayStation, Game Boy), checking out Web sites, sending text messages,
IM’ing, Tivoing, watching what you’ve Tivoed, browsing through magazines
and newspapers, reading new books—now you’ve got to stop and read a book
that first appeared in the last century, not to mention the last millennium? Come
on. Like your outlook on today could seriously be rocked by this plain-spoken
provocation about The World of 1985, a world yet to be infiltrated by the
Internet, cell phones, PDAs, cable channels by the hundreds, DVDs, call-
waiting, caller ID, blogs, flat-screens, HDTV, and iPods? Is it really plausible
that this slim volume, with its once-urgent premonitions about the nuanced and
deep-seated perils of television, could feel timely today, the Age of Computers ?
Is it really plausible that this book about how TV is turning all public life
(education, religion, politics, journalism) into entertainment; how the image is
undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and
how our bottomless appetite for TV will make content so abundantly available,
context be damned, that we’ll be overwhelmed by “information glut” until what
is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as
we’re being amused.... Can such a book possibly have relevance to you and The
World of 2006 and beyond?
I think you’ve answered your own question.
I, too, think the answer is yes, but as Neil Postman’s son, I’m biased. Where
are we to find objective corroboration that reading Amusing Ourselves to Death
in 2006, in a society that worships TV and technology as ours does, is nearly an
act of defiance, one of those I-didn’t-realize-it-was-dark-until-someone-flipped-
the-switch encounters with an illuminating intellect? Let’s not take the word of
those who studied under my father at New York University, many of whom have
gone on to teach in their own college (and occasionally high school) courses
what he argues in these pages. These fine minds are, as my father’s was, of a
