Amusing Ourselves to Death

Reading this book on the media of TV 35+ years after its publication, one might expect the arguments to be dated but they read more like a history than a polemic. The book's central argument about what can be lost in the transition from print media to screen ring true. Simultaneously, Postman speaks negatively about computers, unable to predict the mini renaissance of the written word that they induced and sadly peaked in Web 2.0 which certainly benefited my cohort. Yet that was a temporary modality before the next generation and supporting broadband enabled video media to consume the literal and figurative bandwidth with the same entertainment driving force that TV brought in the century prior. So, it was with that background that I heard his debates and nodded my head with the post-modern media reality of both disinformation and drivel. Both televised politics and religion are worse for the decades in this medium. Education, his third key area, I am less convinced on. Importantly, some of the fundamentals have shifted. The technology has had a democratizing effect and media gatekeepers have been upended. Individual streamers, vloggers, and channel managers are living in the paradox of the entertainment drift of their media and aren't universally making the same choices although many surely have engaged the “sell out”. Others have not. They are not beholden to shareholders. Market share is no longer a zero sum game with fixed channels and time slots. Truly weird things can and do thrive (e.g. ASMR). Discerning viewers can cultivate very different feeds than others. Let me know if anyone has more contemporary critiques in the legacy of McLuhan and Postman.