Amusing Ourselves To Death
by Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves To Death deals with the important issue of how television has affected public discourse. It was written by Neil Postman in 1985, but it is just as relevant as ever now, particularly the diversionary internet having sprung up over the last ten years.
My immediate reaction on reading this was that it is probably one of the most important books that I've ever read.
Broadly, its general gist is that in the society that we have built ourselves "spiritual devestation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face", that the Orwellian nightmare of 1984 has faded and the real threat is as outlined by Aldous Huxley in A Brave New World, where a population is "distracted by trivia" and "cultural life is defined by a perpetual round of entertainments".
Postman makes a compelling case that the height of public discourse was found in the written word of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and that the modern phenomenon of television has eroded this discourse. He explicitly says that there is no problem with television as entertainment (in moderation of course), but that there is a problem when television presents itself as serious and representative. Postman attacks the 60 minutes and CNNs of the world, where one new story blends into the next, and no analysis really takes place (the "And Now... This" phenomenon) where people can barely rememember the previous news story.
It doesn't really provide solutions, but serves more as a warning that we need to be very wary of a medium (pictures and sound combined) that is so pervasive and so easily misappropriated.