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Amusing Ourselves to Death
  • Published: 6 April 2027
  • ISBN: 9781804967126
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $30.00
Categories:

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Public Discourse in the Age of the Screen

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What happens when media and politics become just another form of entertainment?

In 1985, Neil Postman wrote a groundbreaking polemic about the dire effects of television screens on society, ushering us into a dystopia resembling Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It became an instant classic.

Today, we live in an age of social media, screen addiction and artificial intelligence. From the infinite scroll and waning attention spans, to dwindling literacy rates and the loss of critical thinking, Postman's warnings about the dangers of the screen are more prescient than they've ever been.

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, news, education, and even religion become subject to the demands to what we now know as the attention economy.

With a brand-new foreword written by Jonathan Haidt – the bestselling author of The Anxious Generation – this is the definitive examination of how we are willingly sacrificing our ability to reason in the name of entertainment.
  • Published: 6 April 2027
  • ISBN: 9781804967126
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $30.00
Categories:

About the author

Neil Postman

For the last third of the twentieth century, Neil Postman was one of America’s foremost social critics and education and communications theorists, and his ideas and accessibility won him an international following. An influential and revered teacher, he was a professor for more than forty years at New York University, where he founded the renowned Media Ecology program. Blessed with an unusually far-reaching mind, he authored more than twenty books, producing major works on education, childhood, language, news, and technology’s impact on culture. Amusing Ourselves to Death remains his most reverberating and widely read book, translated into more than a dozen languages. He was educated at the State University of New York at Fredonia and Columbia University. He died in October 2003 at the age of seventy-two.
NP

Praise for Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman was a prophet of the new information era... When you read this book, you have to keep reminding yourself that he’s talking about television and Reagan, not the internet and Trump.

OBSERVER

The 40-year-old book that predicted today’s dystopian politics.

TIME

It is hard to read [Postman's work] without feeling he is speaking specifically about us.

VOX

Neil Postman’s "Amusing Ourselves to Death" at 40 is truer than ever.

WASHINGTON POST

Postman predicted that America wasn’t trending towards existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s 1984, but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that resembled Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. He was right. Democracy was not in danger of being overthrown, but over-entertained. If he were alive in 2025, Postman would not be surprised to see that our Soma comes in the virtual variety: TikTok's infinite scroll, crypto speculation and algorithmically tuned content streams designed to blur time and lull us into its flow state.

UNHERD

All I can say about Neil Postman’s brilliant Amusing Ourselves to Death is: Guilty As Charged.

MATT GROENING, creator of The Simpsons

I can’t think of a more prophetic, more thoughtful, more necessary – and yes, more entertaining – book about media culture.

VICTOR NAVASKY, author of The Art of Controversy

Postman's remarkably prescient argument was that television was fundamentally changing the way we think, forcing a move from a literate culture to a visual one in which entertainment was becoming more important than reason.

SAM FREEDMAN, author of Failed State

Postman was on to something important... Amusing Ourselves to Death charted the beginning of a process by which communication has become ever broader and ever shallower.

NEW REPUBLIC

A book that was like putting on a new set of glasses. I consider its argument almost every day.

GAL BECKERMAN, author of The Quiet Before

Few writers are prophetic. An American media studies professor called Neil Postman was... His great insight was that the way we entertain ourselves matters.

THE TIMES

A brilliant scholar... [an] erudite, yet snappily titled treatise.

GUARDIAN

It's unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but his ascent would not have surprised Postman.

CNN

Television, [Postman] wrote, had created a new "species" of information more properly described as disinformation... One trembles to think what [he] would have made of social media, which contains infinitely more creative forms to amuse ourselves.

FINANCIAL TIMES

A brilliant, powerful, and important book. This is an indictment that Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one.

WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

As a fervent evangelist of the age of Hollywood, I publicly opposed Neil Postman’s dark picture of our media-saturated future. But time has proved Postman right. He accurately foresaw that the young would inherit a frantically all-consuming media culture of glitz, gossip, and greed.

CAMILLE PAGLIA, author of Free Women, Free Men