How a Change in Medium Changed Sentiment

“I must, first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now- generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.” – Amusing Ourselves to Death

Entertainer Steve Allen, who began his career in radio, once said that if radio is the theater of the mind, television is the theater of the mindless.  Like print, radio was a medium suitable for rational, complex language requiring an imagination to mentally construct a scene, while television arrived preloaded with images. As a result, TV made us dumber by removing the substance and leaving us with triviality. 

Reading, with its need for focus and concentration, heightens brain activity while stimulating mental sharpness, making its readers more knowledgeable and informed.  TV, on the other hand, delivers its content in rapid and short sequences, requiring little thinking or attention, with repeated breaks between subject matters making for more distractions. When TV is used for matters beyond entertainment, viewers develop Sesame Street Syndrome, expecting to be entertained as they learn in successive intervals.  This shift from the written word to electronics has resulted in a new type of discourse that is destroying the nation.

In Neil Postman’s 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, Postman, a NYU professor, examines how TV turned all public life into entertainment and transformed us from highly literate contemplators to superficial consumers.  At the time of publication, television was the technological advancement of the time, leading to a glut of inane information.  Today, while TV screen time has declined by 31 percent, it has been quickly replaced by a variety of more modern technological screens, as it has become known, TV on steroids.  These screens are now the newest distraction from life. 

Considered ahead of his time, Postman saw how TV was affecting our discourse.  While TV was made for entertainment, its effect was to make every aspect of life about being entertained.  Now, overconsumption of triviality has only gotten worse with gadgets that are available wherever we go. 

Postman’s title, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, comes from Aldous Huxley’s 1932 book, “Brave New World”, a dystopian tale of the future where superficial happiness is manufactured for the masses, and conformity is expected.  In a society where pleasure is prioritized, a mood-altering substance, soma, helps to make its citizens oblivious to the world by blocking out any pain, grief, or stress.  Postman believed that people would come to love this new manner of oppression, where technology obliterated any room for seriousness while undermining the capacity to think.  As Postman suspected, today’s world is reflective of Brave New World, where screens now serve as Huxley’s soma, not only a distraction but as a means to minimize the quality of information.  Rather than oppression by an authoritarian government, subjects are simply ruled by pleasure, as they amuse themselves to death.

From the 17th century to the early 1900s, print was the dominant medium for discourse, whether in books, pamphlets, or through lengthy speeches.  The median of print required not only rational arguments and coherent thoughts, but also a reader who was literate and reasoned.  As such, public sentiment and attitudes were shaped by the written word.  By the mid-1800s, photography and the telegraph became popular by providing worldwide information and a new medium through images, changing public discourse for the first time in centuries, with the change in the medium changing the message.  Then, by the mid-1950s, the introduction of television would only intensify the shift.  News and politics, in particular, created a corrosive and weakening effect on culture as the new medium made everything less serious and more incoherent.

If TV was too trivial to carry important cultural conversations, the glut of screens today has only made discourse worse. News flashes, breaking news, and headlines arrive without substance, discussion, or context.   Endless watching and scrolling of news, opinion, and propaganda, all jockeying to be seen and acknowledged, are trivialized to the point of not being taken seriously, leaving us more and more uninformed.  As a result, modern ideas about the intellect, education, knowledge, and truth have all declined with the introduction of TV and electronics, in general. 

Today, the fallout is obvious.  In 2023, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which produced the national report card, found that only 43 percent of 4th graders were proficient in reading,  with the increase in screen time driving declines in literacy.  Book reading, too, is on the decline, replaced with TVs, computers, and other modern gadgets.  A survey by Reviews.org found that the average American views their smartphones for five hours a day, just short of 4 hours of TV viewing, nearly 3 hours on a laptop or desktop computer, and two hours on a tablet, with most hours spent streaming TV, movies, and music, looking at social media, and gaming. 

In Brave New World, the avoidance of soma led to an all-out rebellion and an end to their complacency and obedience.  Today, awareness of the ill effects of making everything about entertainment is needed to understand the dangers for a society that no longer requires thinking as a requisite for discourse.