Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
TLDR: “An entertaning polemic against television”
This book was written in 1985. The author died in 2003, and this is a second edition published posthumously in 2005. I don’t know if anything was changed, but it has an introduction by the author’s son (also an NYU professor, I gather).
The author doesn’t like television, and he argues for about 200 pages about how TV is messing with our brains. It’s superficial, doesn’t lend itself to analysis, and so easy and facile that we watch it without thinking.
It sounds a little elitist – and it is – but he makes a good case for the written word. He talks about epistemology and why we put more faith in the written word.
Later in the book, he goes off on rants about TV news, the usage of TV in education, and how television has affected politics.
I read it 40 years after it was published, and it’s… quaint. The author was alive for the beginnings of the internet, and you can only imagine how he’d feel if he were alive today. TikTok might literally kill him.
Book Info
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- A softcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.