I just recently finished Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
After reading it, I can say without qualification that I believe this book is absolutely essential reading for any ministry leader, church communications professional/volunteer, or even anyone who owns a TV or computer.
To put it bluntly, the book is a chilling and harsh commentary on our media saturated culture and the corrosive effect it has on our society.
The book begins with a comparison between two authors and books they wrote. George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell’s book details the fear that we would be overcome by authority bent on oppression and propagandazing information. Huxley, however, saw a world where no “Big Brother” was required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity or history. Rather, they would do it to themselves, willingly subjugating themselves via entertainment.
As Postman puts it,
“Orwell feared those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one…Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance… In short, Orwell feared what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us” (Foreward, xix)
Postman then delivers the thesis of the book, stating “This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
From there Postman launches into the book. The book itself was written over 20 years ago, and is thus lacking any significant reference to the modern digital society we live in today. But it is still vastly important to today, for several reason.
The first being that we have not fully transitioned away from Broadcast. If human history could be divided into distinct communications eras, we would define those as Oral, Print, Broadcast, and Digital (a concept I borrow from Rex Miller’s Millennium Matrix, another good book touching on many of the same subjects). When Postman wrote his book, he was on the back end of the Broadcast era. Today, in 2010, we are entering the Digital era at an alarming pace. However, I would say at least half of the population in our country is still operating from a Broadcast mindset, thus making Postman’s book practical on a surface level.
However, beyond just the surface level, we see that Postman’s work is tremendously important because of the deeper truths it tells us about our media. For example, he states that,
“…every technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral. There is an old joke that mocks that naive belief. Thomas Edison, it goes, would have revealed his discovery of the electric light much sooner than he did except for the fact that every time he turned it on, he held it to his mouth and said ‘Hello? Hello?’ … Each technology has an agenda of its won. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold.” (pg. 84).
The primary point that I believe is important for us as Christian Communicators (and we all are, to some extent) to grasp is that technology is NOT neutral. It has, as he suggests, an inherent bias and agenda. I have used the example before of Twitter. It’s bias is to get information out (however inane or enlightening) in short bits. Much in the same way that the printing press has a bias towards being used as a linguistic medium, or that television has a bias towards being used as a visual medium, our digital culture has a bias as well. Postman states that while it is conceivable that a printing press could be used to produce only images, or that a television could simply broadcast written word, it is highly unlikely and goes against the inherent bias of the medium.
Postman makes the assertion that television’s primary agenda, and the common denominator that almost all television programing falls to, is entertainment. That is the overarching theme of everything on television. (I would argue that the digital era extends that and brings the idea of immediacy/convenience, as well as consumerism into the mix). He then argues, that because of television’s influence on culture, we have a new way of conducting our business, even the important business that we would not regard as “entertainment”. Nowhere is this more apparent than the evening news of Postman’s day and the 24-hour news channels of ours. Handsome talking heads bring together disjointed stories that are abbreviated and presented in a way that is entertaining or engaging to the audience. The danger, he says, is not in entertainment. Entertainment is necessary and good for a society. The problem arises when our serious business is brought to the level of entertainment. As Postman says, “‘The A-Team’ and ‘Cheers’ are no threat to our public health. ‘60 Minutes,’ ‘Eye-Witness News’ and ‘Sesame Street’ are.”
Finally, Postman writes a chapter that should be required reading for every church leader entitled “Shuffle Off to Bethlehem,” where he describes the influence television has on religion. I won’t be able to give it the treatment it deserves, but I will say that the warnings he gives to the TV evangelists of the ’80s apply chillingly to the digital culture of today.
Postman writes (channeling his predecessor, Marshall McLuhan, who coined the phrase “the medium IS the message”),
“Most Americans, including preachers, have difficulty accepting the truth, if they think about it at all, that not all forms of discourse can be converted from one medium to another. It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing it’s meaning, texture or value…[for example,] we may find it convenient to send a condolence card to a bereaved friend, but we delude ourselves if we believe that our card conveys the same meaning as our broken and whispered words when we are present… Thought it may be un-American to say it, not everything is televisible. Or to put it more precisely, what is televised is transformed from what it was to something else, which may or may not preserve its former essence.” (pg. 117-118)
Perhaps the most helpful quote he gives is thus: “I believe I am not mistaken in saying Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether” (pg. 121).
Overall, Neil Postman’s work transcends the era it was written in and serves as a wake-up call to a society that has often been naive about the effects of technology. Postman, (and myself), does not criticize technology simply on the principle of what it is, but rather, urges us to become informed and aware of it’s effects, so that we do not end up like those in Huxley’s Brave New World, who “…did not know what they were laughing at and why they had stopped thinking.”
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Oh well. 
