by Neil Postman
A prescient critique arguing that television has transformed public discourse into entertainment, degrading politics, education, religion, and journalism into shallow spectacle. Postman contrasts Orwell's fear of authoritarian censorship with Huxley's vision of a populace pacified by pleasure, concluding that Huxley's dystopia more accurately describes modern America.
In this collection, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business references 3 other books and is cited by 1 other book.
It draws on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Influence and The Soul of a New Machine.
It’s picked up by A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload.
Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.
The books Postman references and why each one mattered to the argument.
Applies Kuhn's concept of paradigm shifts to media history, arguing that the transition from print to television constitutes a fundamental epistemological revolution in how truth is established
Engages with Cialdini's principles of persuasion to explain how television's emphasis on image and likability over substance reshapes political communication into a contest of emotional appeals
Shares Kidder's concern from The Soul of a New Machine about technology's seductive power over human attention, but shifts the lens from computing engineers to an entire culture captivated by television's entertaining glow
The exact passages where other authors bring up “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” and what they take from it.
Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death is cited for its argument about how new media technologies reshape the structure of thought itself. Newport applies Postman's framework to email and the hyperactive hive mind.
Chapter 2
How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.
Directly cited by
Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.
Books with the highest citation overlap within the same categories.
This book and its direct connections. Hover a node to see its title, click to visit.
Hover a node to highlight its connections. Click to open the book page. Node size reflects total citation links.
