The accelerating development of new media in the second half of the 20th century also brought with it the rise of media studies. For a while, theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler appeared like prophets of an unknown but also dangerous intellectual continent. Walter Benjamin and the concept of aura returned to the discussion. And among all the heated debates, Neil Postman’s thoughts took root.
The cultural critic and media scientist, actually a professor of media ecology at New York University, wrote a series of books that became well known among an audience that usually avoids academic topics. Just as Marshall McLuhan’s (always somewhat misunderstood) slogan “The medium is the message” became widespread, Postman managed to create a household word with the title of his book “We amuse ourselves to death”.
The dominance of entertainment undermines political decision-making
The slim volume from 1985 is characterized by a “flattening” of TV programming that was already discussed in the late 1970s, especially in the USA. Postman is not only concerned with the fact that cheap mass-produced products from soaps to raucous talk shows are clogging up the broadcasting slots for the high-spirited – a debate that is still going on in German feature sections – but that the influence of television and other media is influencing thinking influences people decisively and also has serious effects on political culture.
The theorist claims that the new media culture is making people less able to deeply analyze complex issues and have serious discussions. Instead, they are constantly looking for entertainment, which is often superficial and easy to digest. Because media producers also know this, they align their formats accordingly.
Postman warns that this fixation on entertainment and visual stimuli leads to social problems being neglected or certain topics being privileged because of their attractiveness to visual media or their narrative connectivity, while others are neglected because of their complexity and difficulty in depicting them. Serious issues are trivialized instead of being treated appropriately. This, says Postman, can lead to a kind of cultural distraction, leaving people trapped in an infotainment world of superficial pleasure rather than engaging with the deeper challenges and questions of their time.
Orwell vs. Huxley
The starting point of Neil Postman’s thesis that we are amusing ourselves to death is the question of which social dystopia in modern literature has proven to be more valid: Orwell’s “1984” (i.e. the year in which the author wrote his book!) or Huxley’s “Beautiful new world”. The media theorist is certain in his work: Huxley was right! Postman emphasizes that in his book the writer presents the idea that people in a future society could be absolutely controlled through entertainment and distraction. In this world, people constantly use drugs and are distracted by pleasures to suppress their ability to think critically.
Television in the 1980s, as well as the trend toward shriller reporting in magazines and on the radio, gave Postman the impression of being such a drug. The loss of the ability to criticize is then, so to speak, the sacrifice that people make in order not to have to confront the misery around them. From a power and media policy perspective, the point is that there does not have to be tyrannical, all-seeing violence, like in “1984” Big Brother, to dominate people. On the contrary: So sedated by the media, people control themselves. Of course, Postman did not speak of biopolitics, even if Michel Foucault introduced the term in the 70s, but the techniques for educating oneself and known today as self-optimization Constantly suffering from a bad conscience can already be heard here.
It is obvious that the relevance of the discussion will not diminish with the emerging Internet age and the streaming and AI era that has now begun. The world that Postman outlined in his book was still a long way from the time without concentration that today leads people to download apps onto their smartphones so that they can use them less often.
Mechanization as the fate of humanity
The dangers of the information society, in which it no longer matters what is said (because information is theoretically of equal value compared to facts, but can have more impact through media attractiveness), became the theme of his life for Postman. He was horrified by the superficiality and banalization of news and knowledge. He advocated limiting the power of television producers. He didn’t want to foresee that decades later a few large media companies would house entire archives of content and that portals like Netflix would serve as the basis for their own media consumption for an entire generation.
Even before the millennium, Postman predicted that mastering technological development would determine the fate of humanity in the future. In his 1992 book “Technopoly,” the theorist argues that the dominance of technology would lead to it being seen as the solution to all problems. No social problem is then too complicated that it cannot be solved with a simple solution (i.e. with an app, with satellites in space, with wind power and electric vehicles, etc.).
To prevent what he considered to be insane ideas about the supposedly easy controllability of human life and the ubiquity of impotent entertainment from becoming established, Postman emphasized the importance of critical media education in order to help people understand the effects of the media on their thoughts and actions understand. The scientist argued that education needs to be reconsidered in light of technological changes in society in order to create agency. Postman was certain that the advancement of technology would within a very short time limit the possibilities for reforming the education system to such an extent that it would no longer be possible to train people to be able to deal with the dark side of the tempting gadgets and gaming zones.