entertained to death

brief introduction:

There are two ways to wither the spirit of culture, one is Orwellian - culture becomes a prison, the other is Huxleyan - culture becomes a farce.

— Neil Postman

Amusement to Death was first published in 1985 and is one of Neil Postman's masterpieces.

The age of television is flourishing, and television has changed the content and meaning of public discourse. Politics, religion, education, sports, business, and any other content in the public domain are increasingly appearing in the form of entertainment and becoming a cultural spirit. The result is that we have become a species of entertainment to death.

George Orwell once predicted in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" that human beings will suffer from foreign oppression and lose their freedom; Huxley expressed another worry in "Brave New World": People will gradually fall in love with industrial technology Bring entertainment and culture, no more thinking.

"Entertaining to Death" wants to tell everyone that it is Huxley's prediction, not Orwell's, that may become reality; what destroys us is not what we hate, but what we love!

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Editor's Choice:

20 years of classic best-selling works by Neil Postman, a master of media culture studies

Through television and the Internet

Everything is presented in an entertaining manner

Human beings willingly become vassals of entertainment

eventually become a species of entertainment to death

We will be ruined by what we love!

— Neil Postman

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Media and expert comments:

The interaction between Huxley's "Brave New World" and Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is everywhere in the book. Amusement to Death is an excellent, disturbing, thought-provoking book, and dare I say, must-read. It deserves its status as a classic, and despite being 20 years old, it is more current than any book.

—Tim Challies (Discerningreader.com)

"Amused to Death" is the best at helping us see what's going on on the screen. That kind of picture, even without the doomsday prophecy of "cultural demise", is gloomy enough.

—Walter Goodman (The New York Times)

A blow to the head of the entertainment era, Neil Postman's profound foresight.

Today we are already in the world described by Postman, in an era where the ratio of information and action is seriously out of balance, and in the era of unprecedented convenience of electronic media, we are smarter and lighter than ever. The prophecy of Amusement to Death points to our reality today.

——Chen Danqing

Postman is a giant in media studies, second only to Marshall McLuhan.

—Angela Penny, Slam Magazine

Postman persuasively mobilizes psychology, history, semantics, McLuhan theory, and common sense to develop a startling and ingenious thesis.

—Victor Navasky, professor at Columbia University

Postman picks up where McLuhan left off, structuring his insights with the erudition of a scholar and the wit of a storyteller.

—The Christian Science Monitor

The death of Neil Postman has brought a certain silence to public discourse. A learned critic, a scrupulous opponent, a naysayer to the surge of development, fell silent. Looking back at his amazing career, you will find that at the heart of everything he did was a series of questions...he wants you to think about how the alphabet changed oral culture and what the print media did to religion Such effects, how education creates childhood, and why testing to standards means a radical rethinking of the school system.

—Peter Kavanagh, The Globe and Mail

The death of author and media critic Neil Postman has not received the attention it deserved. But that didn't surprise Bozeman at all. He is the author of one of the greatest books on media criticism of our time, Entertaining to Death... Postman understands better than anyone that television has irrevocably changed the nature of debate and that entertainment now reigns supreme in politics.

—Jim Benning, alternet.org

Neil Postman is an incredible storyteller in a great New York tradition...Neil Postman has devoted his life to making us stop as he tells the story...he is a gracious and humble man , he would never say, "I told you so". But he did tell us, over and over again, until lung cancer silenced him forever.

—John Zimmerman, The New York Post

I often think of George Bernard Shaw's famous line, rational people adapt to circumstances, but all progress in the world depends on irrational people. Marshall McLuhan is irrational, Lance is irrational, and Neil is irrational. Because of this, all the good things happen.

—Paul Levinson, American writer and professor at Fordham University

Postman was a prolific writer, presenting his ideas and his grace in some twenty books and numerous interviews and articles. These works are worth reading and thinking deeply, consciously or unconsciously, you will tell others what you read. Postman, the kid who saw through the Emperor's New Clothes, grew up to be an articulate, outraged educator and consumer of society.

—Michael Comf, Academy Quarterly

Each of Postman's books is a pamphlet, an essay in a cover: "The Passing of Childhood" satirizes the infantilization of American culture; Influence...his intellectual stance, his presence in the public arena, and his great gift of great humor, essentially an attempt by a civilized man in a barbaric century to become a civilized man on television Experiments in culture.

—Jay Rosen, Professor, New York University

The role of metaphor comes up again and again in Postman's book. We established the Neil Postman Metaphor Award for two purposes: to honor a gifted author who has mastered the use of metaphor; to honor and promote Postman's work, and to print ideas.

——Sharp Foundation

A book of brilliance, power, and weight. It's a scathing indictment from Postman, and in my opinion, he's irrefutable.

—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

There are some books that everyone should read but very few actually read. Neil Postman's "Amused to Death" is one of them. His analysis of the age of entertainment's destructive effect on the quality of public discourse offers unusually sharp insights into the way technology shapes thought and culture, and with it, all aspects of society. Trivialize.

- "Ebb and flow"

Published in 1985, Amusement to Death is a provocative and provocative look at television's detrimental effects on our lives—and, more specifically, our political, cultural, and spiritual lives.  … The book has so much to recommend it. It sparked a lot of thought, and it made us see the ways in which television has eroded our public discourse and even our whole notion of the good life.

- Seamus Sweeney, social affairs unit.org

It is a call to condemn TV culture: Are we going to entertain ourselves to death? This question is by no means alarmist. I firmly believe that it is a warning that we must heed carefully.

——Zhou Guoping

Perhaps, the hope of cultural salvation lies in the continuous self-reflection of human beings, and in listening carefully to Postman's warning words.

——Liu Qing

"Entertaining to Death" puts forward a very important point of view, that is, what kind of media dominates the era when a country enters modernization, which has a great impact on the whole society.

—— Zhanjiang