On Reading “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Chapter 6

Postman begins Part II, which focuses on aspects of American social life altered by television, with a brief overview chapter on “The Age of Show Business.”

He starts by ridiculing television as a literary device. He offers three parodic examples of TV supporting literature: as a light source to read books by; as an electronic bulletin board in hotels, and as a bookcase foundation on which to stack books.

He offers this ridicule to drive home McLuhan’s argument on the wrongness of “rear view thinking” — that a medium is merely an extension or amplification of an old one (83–84).

“Television does not extend or amplify literate culture,” Postman says. “It attacks it. If television is a continuation of anything, it is of a tradition begun by the telegraph and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not by the printing press in the fifteenth” (84).

But if television is not an extension of the old culture of literature, what is it? “What is television?” Postman asks. “What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are the intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce?” (84).

He deepens the question: “Each technology has an agenda of its own. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold” (84).

He offers an interesting distinction. He praises the beauty and entertainment of television but says, “But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience” (87).

That is, Postman has no problem (or not a huge problem) with television entertainment. It is when television is used for more important social fare — such as civic and political communication — that Postman sees danger. Because television will turn everything into entertainment.

As might be expected, he sees especial danger in television news. It cannot help but be entertainment simply because it is on television. News on television is not meant to be taken seriously.

He writes: “Everything about a news show tells us this — the good looks and amiability of the cast, their pleasant banter, the exciting music that opens and closes the show, the vivid film footage, the attractive commercials — all these and more suggest that what we have just seen is no cause for weeping” (87).

Yet, he says, “There is no conspiracy here, no lack of intelligence, only a straightforward recognition that ‘good television’ has little to do with what is ‘good’ about exposition or other forms of verbal communication” (88).

As an example, Postman dissects the 1983 television show, “The Day After,” a depiction of the world after a nuclear bomb holocaust, which was then followed by an earnest 80-minute discussion by officials and experts.

Even this exemplar of serious television content, Postman argues, ultimately proved to be entertainment. The movie was entertaining and the discussants had a role to play afterward.

Postman writes, “At the end, one could only applaud those performances, which is what a good television program always aims to achieve; that is to say, applause, not reflection” (92).

He acknowledges that some shows push against the restrictions of the medium, such as “Meet the Press.” But he says knowingly, such shows are relegated to Sunday morning, when not many people are watching (91).

“It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest;” he writes, “that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business.”

And television’s large role in U.S. culture makes the medium of immense danger.

“Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore — and this is the critical point — how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged” (92).

Postman despairs that almost every aspect of U.S. life, from criminal trials to college graduation, has devolved into an entertainment spectacle.

He writes: “The nature of its discourse is changing as the demarcation line between what is show business and what is not becomes harder to see with each passing day. Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and news- casters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship” (98).

They perform in an Age of Show Business.