Amusing Ourselves to Death
Public Discourse in the Age of the Screen
$22.95
- Paperback
208 pages
- Release Date
6 April 2027
Summary
What happens when media and politics become just another form of entertainment?
In 1985, Neil Postman wrote a groundbreaking polemic about the dire effects of television screens on society, ushering us into a dystopia resembling Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It became an instant classic.
Today, we live in an age of social media, screen addiction, and artificial intelligence. From the infinite scroll and waning attention spans, to dwindling literacy rates and the loss of cri…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781804967126 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1804967122 |
| Author: | Neil Postman |
| Publisher: | Cornerstone |
| Imprint: | Penguin |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 208 |
| Release Date: | 6 April 2027 |
| Weight: | 200g |
| Dimensions: | 15mm x 129mm x 198mm |
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Critics Review
The 40-year-old book that predicted today’s dystopian politics. * TIME *
Neil Postman was a prophet of the new information era… When you read this book, you have to keep reminding yourself that he’s talking about television and Reagan, not the internet and Trump. * OBSERVER *
A brilliant scholar… [an] erudite, yet snappily titled treatise. * GUARDIAN *
Few writers are prophetic. An American media studies professor called Neil Postman was… His great insight was that the way we entertain ourselves matters. * THE TIMES *
Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” at 40 is truer than ever. * WASHINGTON POST *
It is hard to read [Postman’s work] without feeling he is speaking specifically about us. * VOX *
It’s unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman. * CNN *
Television, [Postman] wrote, had created a new “species” of information more properly described as disinformation… One trembles to think what [he] would have made of social media, which contains infinitely more creative forms to amuse ourselves. * FINANCIAL TIMES *
Postman predicted that America wasn’t trending towards existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s 1984, but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that resembled Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. He was right. Democracy was not in danger of being overthrown, but over-entertained.
If he were alive in 2025, Postman would not be surprised to see that our Soma comes in the virtual variety: TikTok’s infinite scroll, crypto speculation and algorithmically tuned content streams designed to blur time and lull us into its flow state.
* UNHERD *Postman was on to something important… Amusing Ourselves to Death charted the beginning of a process by which communication has become ever broader and ever shallower. * NEW REPUBLIC *
Neil Postman
For the last third of the twentieth century, Neil Postman was one of America’s foremost social critics and education and communications theorists, and his ideas and accessibility won him an international following. An influential and revered teacher, he was a professor for more than forty years at New York University, where he founded the renowned Media Ecology program. Blessed with an unusually far-reaching mind, he authored more than twenty books, producing major works on education, childhood, language, news, and technology’s impact on culture. Amusing Ourselves to Death remains his most reverberating and widely read book, translated into more than a dozen languages. He was educated at the State University of New York at Fredonia and Columbia University. He died in October 2003 at the age of seventy-two.
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