In Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, Postman argues that television has corrupted public discourse. Postman argues that serious public discourse is purported as entertainment on television rather than exposition, reading, and thinking and that television is incapable of serving as a platform for public discourse because it is a medium for entertainment.
Postman being the skilled rhetorician that he is employs subordinate arguments that support his thesis. Furthermore, Postman utilizes sophisticated rhetoric in his polemic to expound upon why the medium that knowledge is sent through affects how people perceive that information. Postman asserts that a televised medium’s immanent biases affect the perception of the information creating pseudo-epistemologies. The significance of Postman’s claims is ostensible but it is the obligation of the reader to analyze and evaluate this argument: the reader has to decide for himself or herself if what Postman is asserting is true and what relevance and value does the argument have to them.
Postman’s Las Vegas Metaphor
Postman opens with an argument about certain cities symbolizing the zeitgeist of America. Postman claims that the symbolic city of the present is Las Vegas, “For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.” Postman is attempting to ensnare reader’s attentions with an elaborate metaphorical argument that he supports well with the historical stories about Boston during the revolution, New York in the mid-nineteenth century, and Chicago during the industrial boom. However, Postman over-generalizes with his argument and stretches the metaphor just a little too much to complement his argument, because Las Vegas could be said to be a symbol of a capitalistic country that exploits its vices. However, Postman is still correct with the overall point he is making with the metaphorical argument: if our culture can devote an entire city to amusement, discourse is bound to be trivialized as well. “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business…The result is we are on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
Analysis of Postman’s Early Arguments
Postman’s early arguments are almost impenetrably strong. He uses the hyperbole about “amusing ourselves to death” as pathos, appealing to the human fear of losing one’s culture and knowledge. Then, Postman employs an ethical appeal by referring to the many historical events in American history and by appearing honorable in his endeavor to improve society and culture. Postman’s logical appeal is the metaphoric comparisons of cities and time periods but after meticulous analysis there are holes in this logic. Postman’s argument that cities are symbolic the zeitgeist holds merit but is a slight misuse of logic; however, the metaphor is still conducive to Postman’s overall argument and is a rational assertion. The finer points of Postman’s argument about the symbolic cities are a little weak, but the point he is referring to with the metaphor is significant.
“I use the word ‘conversation’ metaphorically to refer not only to speech but to all techniques and technologies that permit people of a particular culture to exchange messages. In this sense, all culture is a conversation or, more precisely, a corporation of conversations, conducted in a variety of symbolic modes. Our attention here is on how forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can issue from such forms.” Postman employs this in supporting the main focus of his polemic. I firmly agree with Postman’s argument in this case because language can be seen as a technology with words as the tools we use to express and form our thoughts. Therefore, it is logical since language and conversations are the products and expressions of our thoughts that the compilation of a group’s conversations is their culture.
Postman’s Logos
Postman relies strongly on logos and carefully walks the reader through his thoughts and reasoning. Then, he moves into an anecdotal story that supports his anterior assertions and help the reader grasp his logos. One of Postman’s anecdote is about Indian’s smoke signals: “While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical arguments. Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.” Postman is asserting that because of the constraints of some mediums certain information cannot be conveyed by them. This logic makes sense and is a rational claim and also is humorous.
Postman extends his argument by discussing how the “news of the day” advertises the squalor of society, and has “made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed….We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation.” Postman explains deductively how the technological medium created for “the news of the day” has fragmented conversations. Therefore, we as reader can connect with the idea, deducing that the fragmenting of conversations would cause the deteriorating of culture because significant forms of discourses are distorted. Postman’s subordinate arguments have strong logical appeal and are backed with evidence. After evaluating Postman’s arguments it seems rational to assert that conversations are the foundation of culture.
The Bias of a Medium
After completing his argument on conversation’s meaning to culture, Postman expounds, “A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us.” He is asserting that the mediums that permit our conversations carry biases that end up shaping the way we see the information in the context of our worlds. This is strong logic from Postman but is he completely right? Do forms of media really carry implications with the information? It seems that medium limits the extent of information that can be given, but does it really alter the way we perceive information?
Postman does support for his argument about the bias of media with an anecdote about Lewis Mumford’s philosophy on the clock. Postman elaborates how Mumford’s work discusses how clocks make time into an invention of man’s and because man invented the clock humans have become time-keepers and time-savers. Furthermore, time being made of seconds and minutes supersedes the authority of nature and how eternity formerly served as the focus of human events. This story supports the argument that media affects people and shows that because of the bias a technology inherently has, a group of people’s thought processes can change. Although, this would mean language carries inherent biases that shape people’s thoughts too. So what is it that distinguishes language as a better medium than television? Postman doesn’t address this in this chapter but he does later, however, if he did not it would invalidate his whole argument.
Conclusion
Postman’s polemic has valuable information on discourse and media. His metaphor that Las Vegas symbolizes our country’s zeitgeist; his argument that conversations are the substance of culture; the argument that the medium limits the extent and depth of content; and the argument about the inherent biases of different media-metaphors are all rhetorically valid subordinate arguments. Each of these subordinate arguments contributes to his central argument that television has corrupted public discourse and American intellectual culture.
