Amusing Ourselves to Death
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Neil Postman's 1985 book argues that television turns public life into entertainment, and sets Orwell's fears beside Huxley's.
Neil Postman, an American media scholar, wrote this book after a 1984 talk at the Frankfurt Book Fair. He contrasts the future Orwell imagined, with governments seizing rights, with Brave New World, where people give them up for amusement. Postman holds that each medium suits a certain level of ideas, and that television pulls news, politics and religion toward show business. His son Andrew reissued it in a 20th anniversary edition in 2005.
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