How Entertainment Mangled Public Discourse

I was a skeptic when Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business came out in 1985. A book attacking the frivolity of television seemed, well, frivolous, just another trendy overhyped attack on the way we live now. Hadn’t people always loved pop culture, entertainment, fun? Hadn’t public discourse always included plenty of show business? I was so hostile to the idea that anything fundamental had changed for the worse since Elizabethans flocked to watch bearbaiting around the corner from the Globe Theatre, I confess I didn’t even read the book. 

What did I miss? According to Postman, I was busy looking for signs of the grim future presaged by Orwell in 1984—government censorship, coerced conformity, threats to free speech—when I should have worried more about the world foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, in which those in power control an all-too-willing population with recreational drugs, casual sex, and other hedonistic delights. In the contest between an Orwellian future and a Huxleyan one, the latter had clearly won. After all, government coercion is unnecessary if everyone is having a good time while their rights are stolen and their brains are addled. Memory holes are not needed if people don’t pay attention in the first place. Orwell imagined people forced to have a two-way TV in their apartments—a screen that simultaneously spouted propaganda and watched the citizenry 24/7. In our Huxleyan world, we stare at our phones all day voluntarily while these beloved devices collect all manner of intimate data on us. It’s Big Brother, but fun. 

It was Marshall McLuhan who famously argued that the medium is the message: A society is organized according to its methods of communication. Postman has a similar thesis: The medium is the metaphor. This byword seems a little murky to me, but never mind. Postman means that our very thought processes are organized according to the dominant medium of our time—and television is ruining them. Beginning in the fifteenth century, he explains, the printing press began to change how we thought. It democratized and secularized knowledge; typography promoted close attention to words and a logical way of thinking, in which complex ideas could be connected to each other at length. Widespread literacy in colonial and nineteenth-century America was much noted by de Tocqueville and other European visitors. Most people, including women, could read—Protestantism required much home Bible reading and much careful listening to long, long sermons. 

Postman marvels at the attention span of ordinary Americans during what he calls the Age of Exposition. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, involved a three-hour speech by each man, with hour-long rebuttals. At one point, observing that Douglas, who went first, had just finished speaking and it was already 5 p.m., Lincoln suggested the audience go home for dinner and come back for the rest of it—and they did. In our time only dictators speechify like that—Fidel Castro was famous for it—and they have a captive audience. What would Lincoln and Douglas have made of what 2024 is bringing us: a single two-hour Harris-Trump debate on ABC, with two minutes per question for each side, plus two commercial breaks, and ongoing split-screen reactions from each candidate, followed by the instant verdicts of assorted TV pundits?

By the mid-twentieth century, television had become the dominant medium, the one that other media try to resemble. While snobs might think the problem with TV is the vulgarity and silliness of much of the entertainment it provides, for Postman “the best things on television are its junk.” His quarrel is with the high end: “Television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.” Inevitably, these conversations are dumbed down by the need to be entertaining and cater to an audience with the knowledge base of a cocker spaniel and the attention span of a housefly. As the newscaster Robert MacNeil wrote of TV news, the idea “is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement. You are required to pay attention to no concept, no character and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time.”

Think of the faux seriousness of political talk shows like Meet the Press, with their rotating cast of droning commentators memorably described by Calvin Trillin as “Sabbath gasbags.” Unless one has a professional interest, who even remembers a day later anything that David Brooks and Mark Shields said in their decades-long friendly sparring matches on PBS News Hour? But it passes the time; it gives viewers the illusion of being in the know. Even boring TV has to be entertaining.

It’s easy to quarrel with Postman’s idealized vision of the past. Like many bemoaners of current ills, he tends to compare the absolute best of the past with the run of the mill or degraded present. As Walter Goodman pointed out in The New York Times Book Review, the Lincoln-Douglas debates and Jonathan Edwards’s sermons were extraordinary even in their own time. At times too, Postman comes across as simply stuffy and old-fashioned, maybe even a crank. The early decades of the twentieth century produced a lot of great writing—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck—but for him the rot had already set in: This was “exposition’s nightingale song, most brilliant and sweet as the singer nears the moment of death.” (I think he means the swan, not the nightingale.) But wonderful serious fiction continued to be produced and widely read: Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Baldwin, Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez come to mind, to name just a few of Postman’s contemporaries. 

Perhaps he was just uncomfortable with new styles and topics. He mocks Dr Ruth Westheimer for bringing humor and plain talk to sex advice, but what’s wrong with a friendly grandmotherly person with a cute German accent educating millions about sex as a normal human activity? Consider the alternative: Dr. Theodore van de Velde’s immensely popular (and advanced for its time) Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, first published in 1926, which referred to kissing as “bucco-lingual contact,” insisted on simultaneous orgasm, and claimed that white men’s semen smelled nicer than that of other races.

Postman also seems oblivious to the times when the high-end television he despises actually fulfilled its mission of educating and informing the public. The 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame laid bare the terrible conditions under which farmworkers produced our food. Television reporting on the civil rights movement in the South and the violent opposition to it sparked global attention to racial injustice. The war in Vietnam was called “the living room war” for a reason: For the first time in history the horrors of war were made plain to people thousands of miles away every night at dinner time. Today the same thing is happening with Israel’s war on Gaza, although much of the coverage is online only. It is hard to imagine newspapers or books having the same galvanizing, immediate effect. They take too long to arrive, for one thing, and reach far fewer people. For another, broadcast TV is by its nature a communal experience: People watch at the same time and talk about it together, in real time.

Nonetheless, Postman was on to something important. The expectation that everything be amusing does have a corrupting influence in areas where hard work needs to be done, attention needs to be paid, and the reward is not immediate. As Euclid said to his princely tutee, there is no royal road to geometry—some things are just difficult. (Twenty-five years ago, the principal of my daughter’s school thought learning the multiplication tables was unnecessary: Here was indeed a royal road, and it was the calculator. Parents rebelled.) Not surprisingly, Postman is horrified by educational television. The real lesson kids learn on Sesame Street, a particular bugbear of his, is not their numbers and letters but that learning ought to resemble a TV commercial: “Its use of cute puppets, celebrities, catchy tunes, and rapid-fire editing was certain to give pleasure to children and would therefore serve as adequate preparation for their entry into a fun-loving culture.” Compared to educational television, the classroom “begins to seem a stale and flat environment for learning.” Why can’t Susie’s math teacher be as funny as the Count von Count? Why does actual science have to be harder than watching The Voyage of the Mimi?  (Postman would weep to see how TV is marketed to ever younger kids—Peppa Pig? Cocomelon?—even as researchers warn against screens for toddlers, to the guilty rage of overworked parents desperate for a break.) I’m not sure people are getting stupider, exactly, and if they are TV is surely only one of many causes, but something is badly off kilter when more than 60 percent of Americans can’t say who we fought against in World War II, but (trust me) have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Kardashians.

Postman’s jeremiad against TV seems rather quaint today, and not just because he was shouting into the wind and knew it. Compared to the 24/7 cacophony of social media, TV is like an illuminated manuscript. TV after all, was top down. Remember when there were just a handful of channels? When Walter Cronkite told us, “That’s the way it is” every night and people believed it? That made for a duller, more conformist world, but at least you weren’t constantly exhorted to “do your own research” in the far recesses of YouTube, where you would find proof that George Soros was really a Nazi, Covid was a hoax, and Hillary Clinton was organizing the mass rape of children.

Postman sees TV as the great national tranquilizer, and maybe it was, but I’m sure he’d be even more appalled at what social media has done to our brains, which is to shred what little remains of our attention spans—by which I mean my attention span—while making us more anxious, more depressed, more envious, more gullible, and more spiteful. At least when Amusing Ourselves to Death came out you couldn’t doomscroll till three in the morning. The dick pic didn’t exist. There were no influencers. Back then, it took effort to send a death threat—you had to find pen and paper, an envelope, a stamp, and your victim’s home address; you had to walk to a post box and hope nothing in your letter gave your identity away. Thanks to the internet, sending the most vile threats couldn’t be simpler, to say nothing of transmitting the sexist and racist insults, dog piling, unwanted porn, Nazi memes, and other features that make social media such a joy.

Social media has radically democratized public discourse, and that is on the whole a good thing. but there’s a price to pay for increased knowledge of what your fellow humans are thinking, and too often that knowledge is itself the price. I say this as a helpless addict of Twitter and lover of cat videos. I’ve made real-life friends through social media, but it’s a rare person who seems as good a human being online as off it. 

Consider too the cost of those benefits: in walks not taken, books unread, articles dropped after the first or second paragraph, hours lost to quarrels with strangers over trivia and trips down rabbit holes. Amusing Ourselves to Death charted the beginning of a process by which communication has become ever broader and ever shallower. Now AI is poised to drag us into the next phase, in which machines will not just transmit our writing but produce it as well. I wish Neil Postman were around to shout into the wind about that.