Amusing Ourselves to Death
The rise of the internet, (subsequently followed by social media, app-based messaging, and thereafter by video short-form content) has left many of us grappling with the long term effects of visual media on our development, mental wellbeing, and our relationships with each other. This reckoning spans all levels of society, from the national level (countries enacting social media bans), to the corporate level (airlines feeling the pressure to improve internet connectivity with Starlink), down to the individual level (using ‘digital wellbeing’ apps to manage screen time).
Some may say that this is just a tired redux of many societal conversations we’ve had grappling with using different technologies over time. I personally remember conversations about violence in video games in the late 90’s with the rise of first-person shooters (though some people even considered Pokemon too dangerous to buy for their kids).
One of the main critics in this bygone era was Neil Postman, who 40 years ago wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death about the effect of television on American society. After reading it, I do agree with folks who say the piece is relevant to this day. Postman’s main thesis is that television has transformed American discourse from debate to entertainment, and he explores the ramifications of that transformation on American society. If Postman were to write his book in 2025, his thesis would certainly broaden from television to visual media as a whole, and of course this is a worldwide trend rather than being localized to the US.
Modern versions of this critique include Chris Hayes’ The Siren’s Call or Jonathan Haidt’sThe Anxious Generation, and I do definitely worry about the effects of social media on all of us.
Do I agree with Postman that TV has transformed discourse into entertainment? By and large I do, but I’m not sure print-era discourse was more productive than current day discourse.
Do we need to discuss whether print media discourse in the 16th – 19th centuries in Europe resulted in reasoned or rational behavior from its (large and varied) populace? It was during this time that modern-day racism rooted and flowered into what we see today. Did the writings of Bartolomeo de las Casas stop the colonization of South America? Did it stop hereditary wealth transfer in Peru once the original conquistadors died? Did the print-heavy culture of the US prevent the Trail of Tears or the oil rush in the Dakotas?
Print journalism is slow, which according to Postman is a feature. However, this slowness cannot serve as an effective check on swiftly executed actions/domino effects such as coups, assassinations, spontaneous violence. Conversely, some events happen over such a long time frame that the experience of that change is only seen across generations (such as the extinction of insects). While books capture this progression well, humans aren’t good at internalizing the before and after states because the change happens so slowly. In either case, are books useful in providing a backbone for a responsive and responsible society?
Let’s take Postman’s example of the Lincoln-Douglas 1858 debates over slavery, which has since been re-quoted a ton, as being dichotomous between the print-dominated universe and the present day.
“Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed. In fact, they had tangled several times before, and all of their encounters had been much lengthier and more
exhausting.” (44)
Now, I think it’s eminently laughable to envision Joe Biden and Donald Trump having a similarly lengthy or substantive debate during the 2024 debates about anything at all. However, even if Biden/Trump were capable of having an hour-long debate about preventing genocide in Gaza, I doubt their positions would be significantly different than what their administrations are actually doing (which of course amounts to very little). Additionally, I don’t actually think having a debate would force candidates to have cohesive and detailed frameworks for their positions, NOR do I think a result of that debate would be voters demanding different positions than they already are.
Postman (and Hayes) may argue that our apathy as voters stems from years of conditioning via doom-scrolling, a 24 hour news cycle, and our treatment of the debate as mere entertainment. However, I think our apathy would have come from being physically unaffected by the war, which makes it such that the war doesn’t actually have a tangible impact on our day-to-day lives.
An issue that may have some impact on our lives today is the emergence of AI embedding itself into our national infrastructure. Watching a 25 minute video of Hank Green talking about the complexities of AI energy usage, and then 30 minutes of ___ responding to the ideas discussed seems quite similar to a Lincoln/Douglas debate format, though we can ingest this material through video rather than in-person or via newspapers.
While the nature of the technology is important, the nature of our discourse itself has not fundamentally changed between now and the 19th (or 14th) century. Consequently, I don’t believe that the actions coming out of these conversations are meaningfully different despite using a different technology to engage in the discourse. We respond most strongly to issues which have salience in our lives. Ideas and news without local/personal context serve as entertainment far more than as actionable events. The Lincoln-Douglas debates proved popular because slavery itself was a salient issue. The Dred-Scott decision, Illinois’ proximity to slave states, and the westward pull due to popular sovereignty territories all impacted voters. It makes sense that they would find these debates to be highly important. In fact, even the debates themselves had a state fair-like element around them: “All of the Lincoln-Douglas debates were conducted amid a carnival-like atmosphere. Bands played (although not during the debates), hawkers sold their wares, children romped, liquor was available.”
On the other hand, although Gaza hosted the biggest human calamity of 2024, and although climate change (and nuclear war) poses existential risks to humanity’s current way of life, I don’t think any of these issues actively impact people in a way that drives them to take concrete actions. I’m not claiming that people don’t take actions based on the news they read/watch, there are certainly folks that partake in the BDS movements or work to lower their climate impact. However, I think that the number of people taking actions doesn’t change whether we live in an information ecosystem dominated by print or one dominated by video. This shows that Postman’s point that news has become entertainment is true, because the news we consume is mostly not salient to our lives.
What, then, is salience? We as consumers of news cannot meaningfully engage the material to make a noticeable impact, nor can we easily connect ourselves to it in a meaningful way. I would say that increasing salience is equivalent to our context around the news we consume, and limiting our intake of news for which we have little context.
Take the following passage as an example of the issue we face:
“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime, and unemployment? What are you plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran?” (68)
I read this whole passage without remembering this book was written 40 years ago. It’s crazy how these issues are still at stake today! Somebody ‘doomscrolling’ the newspaper at that time may have spent a lot of emotional well-being managing their anxieties, but that hand-wringing didn’t help them, nor did it create a lasting solution to these issues which regularly make the front page of the news in 2025.
In the present day, what is the value of having the news brought to my screen from all around the world? How do I gain by knowing about flooding in Dak Lak, Colombo, and Padang? I have friends who live in Vietnam and can certainly donate to local charities to help with recovery efforts. That is the extent of the salience I feel, but what about the many resource-starved communities where I don’t have personal connections? Perhaps our mental order and well-being is better served by not keeping abreast of issues in places where we don’t have prior context?
This resonates with me because I’m currently living in Hong Kong, far away from places where I have context. I am a person who generally looks to understand context and history with respect to current events. However, that’s a process that takes time and energy. Even as someone who has followed news about Hong Kong for a decade, living here for a few months has taught me so much more about the city and it’s history than I could have learned by reading articles or watching videos on the internet.
On the other hand, New York City and it’s suburbs are places where I have a ton of prior context. When I hear news from Rockland, I have a deeper innate understanding of it’s background and how it affects the people I know. My friends and family in the area also have the ability to provide additional context to inform my understanding of the local news. Additionally, I have much more of an ability to effect change or leverage a network to take actions. That’s not the case here in HK. Here, I suppose I can only be a change agent in somebody else’s network.
Another note about Postman’s commentary regarding the telegraph: “A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about.”
I think Postman’s take here (being 40 years old) is reductive, and we live in such an obviously interconnected world that I think it’s useful to have global news.
While I don’t interpret Postman’s point about information irrelevance to be directed towards people’s movement/migration, I think the logic regarding the former should be considered with the latter as well. When we move to a new place and lack context for its being and history, it neuters our ability to engage with our new setting, interpret current events, and use our agency in ways we consider worthwhile. Migration is wired deep into our nature, so I’d not suggest that preservation of our local context is worth staying somewhere that doesn’t serve our needs.
Personally, while it’s true that my action-potential is higher in my hometown than in Hong Kong, true that my network is wider and deeper, and true that my historical context is richer, I can’t escape the feeling that I myself feel slightly neutered when in NYC. The prospect of my primary interactions being with people who have a preexisting understanding of my nature is a turn-off to moving back. Thus, balancing my self-actualization and the desire for salience in news consumption pull in opposite directions. Increasing my contextual understanding of Hong Kong may take time to increase the salience of Hong Kong’s discourse, but that tradeoff is worthwhile provided my consumption of news is not reduced to mere entertainment.
There are many conclusions we can draw when considering our interactions with the internet through the Postman lens. In my opinion, the takeaway that print-based discourse is more conducive to productive discussion doesn’t hold enough water to actually be useful. A print based information economy prevailed during eras where eugenics, colonialism, and genocide took place, lacking sufficient action-potential to stymie those trends. A more useful conclusion would be that news being turned into entertainment is inevitable if we lack a historical and local context for that news. This conclusion allows us to consider ways to increase the salience of news, both by limiting our ingestion out-of-context news, and by intentionally building up a personal context for places and news that interests us. This, along with having a local network, is what gives individuals agency to effect change in response to current events.
