Chapter 1: "The Medium Is the Metaphor"

After reading Ch 1 of Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, I couldn't agree more with his main claim: "how our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics" (13). Although this book was written in 1984, it still resembles striking similarities to that of our culture today. In all honesty, the only difference seems to be that our culture has become even more severely "transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business" (4) than it was when this was written. Today, with the inclusion of the Internet—Postman's television—has brought an even greater transformation towards this era of entertainment. In actuality, if Postman were able to rewrite this chapter today, with the presence of the Internet, his claim would only be strengthened. The internet shows this transformation in work as it combines texts with images, yet people are much more attracted to the images than the text (you likely noticed the images down below before you read the word "after" in my first sentence).

Postman makes a very bold claim when he states, "that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death" (4). Like much of this chapter, this point seems to be exaggerated but it does make a good point: our lives have simply become long series of entertainment. By continuing to live lives where "we must look to the city of Las Vegas [...] as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration" (3), we invite a lifelong experience of mindless entertainment where our culture seems to almost come to standstill, unlike our past culture of moving forward. 

A recent event in our classroom that seems to support Postman's claim is when we evaluated different brochures from different Colleges. In most cases, students would be far more inclined to look over a Harvard brochure filled with bright colors and pretty pictures than the brochure of Berkeley, filled with black and white text and a few smaller pictures. To be quite honest, the brochure of Berkeley actually seemed to hold much more valuable and important information, but I too fall into the problems of society for if I were sitting in a waiting room and could pick one brochure to look at, I would evaluate the one of Harvard in a heartbeat. 

One final point that I had to make was as I was reading this first chapter, I couldn't stop myself from remembering the text I had to read over summer, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Both these texts were remarkably similar for they both demonstrate the effects of a society shifting from a medium of technology over text. In fact, there were specific chapters in Carr's book where he mentioned how he, and the majority of others, would rather view something with striking pictures than plain text. This book, written in 2011, shows how our society hasn't really moved forward 26 years after Postman writes about the same ideas. That simple argument proves Postman's thesis. 

Who would you rather have as your president?