Amusing Ourselves to Death
Alondra Lopez, Kelsey Keegan,
Jonathan Een Newton,
Rosa Haxton
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/20090211_thousand_words-01_cropped.jpg
Discussion Question
•How much do you value how funny a
professor is?
•Do you believe that you remember
things better when they are humorous?
“Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin
us. Huxley feared that what we love will
ruin us. This book is about the possibility
that Huxley, not Orwell, is right.”
Amusing Ourselves to Death Comic
http://www.recombinantrecords.n
et/docs/2009-05-AmusingOurselves-to-Death.html
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Postman states that his book is “an inquiry into and a
lamentation about the most significant American cultural
fact of the second half of the 20th century: the decline of
the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of
Television.”
 Can these two very different types of media
accommodate the same ideas?
 http://video.foxnews.com/v/1007046245001
/exclusive-jon-stewart-on-fox-news-sunday/
Ch. 1 - The Medium is the Metaphor
 Postman agrees with McLuhan, but says his model needs
revision:
 Message VS. Metaphor definitions
 “We start from the assumption that in every tool we create,
an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the
thing itself” (14).
Evolution of Media
Oral, print, television, computer.
Charlie Brooker: How to report
the News
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSX
MuWMR4
 “American businessmen discovered, long
before the rest of us, that the quality and
usefulness of their goods are subordinate to
the artifice of their display…” (4).
Ch. 2 - Media as Epistemology
 Postman’s definition of Epistemology – “complex &
usually opaque subject concerned with the origins & nature
of knowledge” (17).
 Definitions of truth are derived, at least in part, from the
character of the media of communication through which
information is conveyed
Ch. 2 - Media as Epistemology
 “Through resonance,” according to Northrop Frye, “a
particular statement in a particular context acquires a
universal significance” (17).
 “Every medium of communication […] has
resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large”
(18).
Discussion Question
 Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in the mid
1980's.
 What do you think Postman would say of our current
media phenomena and the implications of their
ubiquitous nature today?
 Is television still a problem? How has the internet
changed things?