Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Written by:
Neil Postman
Narrated by:
Jeff Riggenbach

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
18
Narrator
10
Release Date
January 2007
Duration
4 hours 49 minutes
Summary
In this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how “entertainment values” have corrupted the very way we think. As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television. And because television is a visual medium, whose images are most pleasurably apprehended when they are fast-moving and dynamic, discourse on television has little tolerance for argument, hypothesis, or explanation. Postman argues that public discourse—the advancing of arguments in logical order for the public good, once a hallmark of American culture—is being converted from exposition and explanation to entertainment.
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Anonymous

The book is well worth the read and very applicable to today.

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Anonymous

Actually pretty boring; most points were obvious, and written in a lofty manner with a nerdy type of humor. Not my pick, but had to read it for a class. Don't recommend.

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Diane Crew

A fascinating and important book which, even though it was written in the 1980s before the rise of the internet, Twitter, and other social media forums, is more timely than ever and needs to be read to help explain today's politics and culture. The narrator, however, is almost gabbling at some points, he reads so quickly.

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