Lessons from Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Dan Silvestre
14 min readSep 11, 2018

Rating: 9/10

Finished: 08/2018

Read more on Amazon

Get the full index of lessons here

“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”

Short Summary

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman shows how the most popular media of a time in history shapes the discourse of the world. Written in 1985, it focuses on how television has negatively affected the level of public communication in contemporary America but it’s even more relevant today in the internet era.

Lessons

There are two literary dystopic visions:

  • George Orwell, who in “1984” warned about a tyrannical state that would ban information to keep the public powerless
  • Aldous Huxley, who in “Brave New World” depicted a population too amused by distractions — entertainment, leisure, and laughter — to realize that they had been made powerless

Postman believes that the communication inspired by television has turned our world into a more Huxleyan one.

“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…

--

--

Dan Silvestre
Dan Silvestre

Written by Dan Silvestre

Performance coach helping leaders get the right things done with less effort than anything they've tried before. Join 20k+ readers: newsletter.dansilvestre.com

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?