Are You Amused to Death????

While enjoying my morning coffee and browsing news headlines, one caught my eye. The headline read "Yoko Ono's Top Five Must Reads." I clicked on the link and browsed the list. The title of one book especially appealed to me - "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman.
A quick trip to Amazon shows its available in paperback or as an audiobook. The paperback is out of print and there were only 28 copies available. I suspect that number will soon change. According to the product description, Amusing Ourselves to Death "Examines the ways in which television has transformed public discourse--in politics, education, religion, science, and elsewhere--into a form of entertainment that undermines exposition, explanation and knowledge. "

We, as human beings, are conditioned by our culture, society, parents, religion education, peer groups and anything else that influences our thinking and beliefs. A brief visit to Wikipedia brings up the following definition of social conditioning:

"  Social conditioning refers to the sociological process of training individuals in a society to respond in a manner generally approved by the society in general and peer groups within society. The concept is stronger than that of socialization, which refers to the process of inheriting norms, customs and ideologies. Manifestations of social conditioning are vast, but they are generally categorized as social patterns and social structures including education, employment, entertainment, popular culture, religion, spirituality and family life. The social structure in which an individual finds him or herself influences and can determine their social actions and responses. Social conditioning represents the environment and personal experience in the nature vs. nurture debate. Society in general and peer groups within society set the norms which shape the behavior of actors within the social system. A work of literature that helps show this is "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley."
In order to grow and evolve as individuals and a race, it is important to understand how we are conditioned so that we can break free and liberate ourselves of conditioned patterns that hold us back and stunt our growth.

Although I have not personally read this book, it looks like the author wrote in an an attempt to help people gain an awareness of how we are conditioned by pop culture via the entertainment business.

Barron Laycock, who reviewed the book on Amazon, writes, "Postman binds your interest by illustrating and documenting how the rise of the elecrtonic media and its manipulation of what you see in way of news and entertainment has inexorably changed the meanings,purposes and ultimate uses of politics, economics, and technology. As Huxley himself warned, totalitarian societies need not arise through violent overthrow of the democracies using brutality, cruelty and violence, but can also occur whenever the citizenry is successfully deluded into apathy by petty diversions and entertainments, as well."

In another review, Ben Barczi writes, "Postman's thesis in this brief but articulate book consists of two tenets: (1) The form of communication, to some extent, determines (or is biased toward certain types of) content; (2) Television, as our modern-day uber-form of communication, has biases which are destructive toward the rational mind. TV teaches us to expect life to be entertaining, rather than interesting; it teaches us to expect 8-minute durations of anything and everything (anything else is beyond our attention span); it teach us to be suspicious of argument and discussion, and instead to accept facts at face value. Furthermore - and, by far, the most important discovery Postman makes in this book - TV teaches us to live a decontextualized life."

Barczi later states, "It certainly is true that the vast majority of Americans are perfectly happy not to develop any sort of framework or philosophy; life is simply life, and one doesn't need to consider it. Even today's elite students, who are certainly able to integrate lessons and perform well academically, have fallen to this malady; as David Brooks pointed out in his searingly accurate article, "The Organization Kid," (Atlantic Monthly, April 2001) top-notch students no longer attempt to build any sort of moral or philosophical structure from their studies; a life lived in a context, makes no sense to the student who has grown up watching the decontextualized television screen."

Amusing Ourselves to Death inspired Amused to Death, a concept album by Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, which was released in 1992. According to Wikipedia, Amused to Death explores Waters' disillusionment with modern Western society, focusing specifically on the influence of television and the mass media.
In an interview published in the L.A. Times in September 1992, Roger's is quoted as saying, "So I became interested in this idea of television as a two-edged sword, that it can be a great medium for spreading information and understanding between peoples, but when it's a tool of our slavish adherence to the incumbent philosophy that the free market is the god that we should all bow down to, it's a very dangerous medium. Because it's so powerful."

The song "Perfect Sense" inspired John Isaak Alpert to analyze the lyrics on Water's album. "Roger Waters's "Perfect Sense" from the album, Amused to Death, questions why we view the world in terms of profit instead of human life. For me it opened up the question of how we value things. " Discussing the song "What God Wants, Part I, Alpert writes, "The second song "What God Wants, Part I" starts by telling us how the will of the controllers of the mass media is imposed on the individual. This is made very clear by the repetition of key lines. "  You can read the entire piece on Water's website. 

Both the album and the book sound like they contain an important message. Maybe its time to turn off the media and learn to think for ourselves.
　
　

　

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