Books That Stay with Me: "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman

When Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, its author, Neil Postman, could not have imagined a world of TikTok reels, YouTube shorts, and infinite scrolls. Yet his warning about the trivialization of public discourse feels eerily prescient. It’s one of those rare works that doesn’t age — the world simply grows into it.

The book opens with the image of four American cities, each symbolizing the “spirit of a culture.” Once, Boston represented a world of political activism; then New York came to stand for “melting-pot America”; later Chicago for its industrial energy and dynamism; and finally, Las Vegas — a city of entertainment — became the symbol of America itself. Postman saw in this shift the story of a civilization that had begun to “amuse itself to death,” where serious public conversation gave way to performance. Reading him today feels less like visiting the past than glancing in the mirror.

I first read the book about twenty years ago, trying to understand why public conversations seemed to be getting shallower even as access to information exploded. Postman’s central idea was that every communication medium privileges a certain kind of thinking. Print culture, with its long sentences and complex arguments, demands patience and reasoning. It rewards ideas that unfold slowly. Television, by contrast, favours image over argument, feeling over logic, and brevity over depth. And so, a society that lives by television will slowly learn to think as television thinks — in fragments, in slogans, in sound bites.

The Foreword of the book contains one of the most haunting contrasts – between George Orwell and Aldous Huxley – in modern thought:

“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

Orwell’s dystopia was one of censorship and fear; Huxley’s was one of distraction and pleasure. Postman argued that we had entered Huxley’s world — a society not oppressed by force, but sedated by entertainment.

It captures, in a single image, the essence of Postman’s argument: not nostalgia for a pre-television world, but the loss of our capacity for sustained, rational public conversation. Television, he wrote, “does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it.” Each medium, in other words, carries its own way of defining what counts as truth. The printed word invited reflection; the image demanded reaction.

Forty years after the book was first published, we inhabit the logical conclusion of that trend. Our media are not only visual and emotional; they are performative. The question is no longer “What do you believe?” but “How will it look when you say it?” Even serious debates are now judged less by the strength of reasoning than by the rhythm of delivery and the sharpness of the caption. When everything becomes entertainment, thinking becomes optional.

Postman worried that television would turn every sphere of public life into show business. Today, we don’t need television to do that — we do it ourselves. We curate our identities, opinions, and even moral outrage for visibility. The platforms differ in tone, but the underlying logic is the same: the value of a thought is measured by how quickly it draws attention.

Even this post, as I write and share it on LinkedIn, is part of that economy. I know it must hold attention long enough for a reader to pause mid-scroll, maybe click “full reflection here,” maybe read to the end. In a sense, I’m playing within the same system I’m critiquing — hoping that a reflective idea can still compete with a carousel or a clever hook.

For someone who works in education, this has unsettling implications. Learning, at its core, requires slowness — the time to dwell with confusion, to reread, to question. When we begin to treat learning as another form of content, something to be packaged, posted, and reacted to, we trade understanding for impressions. The mind learns to expect dopamine, not insight.

Amusing Ourselves to Death shaped the way I see classrooms and public discourse alike. It helped me name what I had been sensing: that the real challenge in education today is not ignorance, but attention. Postman gave me a language for this — the idea that each medium carries a moral bias. It teaches us, wordlessly, what to value: speed over depth, performance over presence, reaction over reflection. Understanding that has shaped much of my work since — in how I design learning experiences, in how I read, and even in how I scroll.

Four decades later, as algorithms curate our attention and shape our beliefs, Postman’s insights seem prophetic. The danger is no longer merely that we consume trivialities, but that we lose the habits of thought that make seriousness possible. We don’t need Big Brother to watch us; we are busy watching ourselves.

And yet, perhaps the enduring value of Amusing Ourselves to Death lies not in its pessimism but in its invitation — to reclaim our capacity for attention, to treat thinking as an act of resistance, and to remember that meaning cannot be streamed, only made.

Postman closes his book with a passage that now reads less like prophecy and more like instruction:

“What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

If Postman warned that we might amuse ourselves to death, perhaps the antidote is to learn — and to teach — as if attention were a sacred act. Reading deeply, sitting with difficulty, resisting the compulsion to react immediately — these are not nostalgic gestures. They are forms of quiet rebellion. To choose a book over a feed is not a retreat from the world; it is a way of returning to it with clarity. That’s why Amusing Ourselves to Death stays with me. It’s not a lament for a vanished world of print, but a reminder that meaning depends on how we choose to look — and how long we are willing to stay there.