Amusing Ourselves to Death

“A major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content.”

One of the last books I read before the new year. Postman here does something rare in the field of social sciences; that is, he develops a concept that not only captures the essence of his time but goes further to somehow lend use to understanding the contemporary moment long after his time. Postman speaks to the dangers that were occurring via the pop culture’s rise of media against the long-standing information carrier of literature—the rise of political cartoons, comics, and Hollywood stars against the written word. The concern here is how the vapid popularity of a new mode of relating to knowledge and the external world would go on to affect society at large.

Medium is the Message

“The medium is the message.”

A quick detour to McLuhan can give some insight into what Postman is writing about. McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message” captures the idea that it’s not just the content of media that shapes society but the very medium itself. This fits neatly into Postman’s argument, where the shift from print-based culture to visual media alters not only how we receive information but also how we process and engage with the world. McLuhan’s insight helps us understand how media doesn’t just deliver content—it shapes our thinking, perception, and even our fundamental ways of being, leading us toward a more abbreviated, reactive form of existence, as Postman warns.

The Effect of Media

Taken from McLuhan, It makes clear an intriguing, maybe controversial, point on the state of politics. The point is that everyone is post-modern in their politics to the extent that their visceral reactions are the starting points. To make clear, I’m saying that most people operate via intuitionism and that their “first/root premises” are justified via this visceral response to a claim. The further point is how these arguments are now being made via digital media or news media, which makes it so much easier to become afflicted by this unconscious form of ad hominem. That is using emotional reactions as a dismissal of the message through an attack on the medium or the messenger.

However, Postman is going a step further to generalize these effects not only on politics but on all facets of being. Postman believes that television, and by extension, later forms of digital media, have not only changed how we communicate but have fundamentally altered what it means to be human. Because we only see each other and the world through a spectacle of appearances, along with how these appearances will always offer a truncated view of one another, we have lost what it means to be truly human. The meteoric rise of “the reels,” which sadly ironically works as a way of genuinely describing how it psychologically reels its users, is just but an expected stage in reaching the pinnacle of the new communication medium.