About the Book

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: No Logo, Empire and Communications, the Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, Everything Bad Is Good for You, the Society of the Spectacle, the Journalist and the Murderer, Empire of Mind, Expanded Cinema, the Medium Is the Massage, Public Opinion, the Media Elite, Amusing Ourselves to Death, It's Not News, It's Fark, Areopagitica, Do Good Design, Tetrad of Media Effects, Mediated, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women, Haunted in the New World, We the Media, Live From Baghdad, the Problem of the Media: U.s. Communication Politics in the 21st Century. Excerpt: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman .The book's origins lie in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell's 1984 and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's 1984, where they were oppressed by state control.It has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition. It is regarded as one of the most important texts of Media Ecology . Summary Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma," by means of which the consumers' rights are exch...

Product Details

Media: Paperback Book, 34 pages

Language: English

Publisher: Books LLC, Wiki Series (May. 20th, 2010)

ISBN-10: 1156406145

ISBN-13: 9781156406144

Dimensions: 7.44 x 9.69 x 0.07 inches

Shipping Weight: 0.18 lbs

• Categories: Not Classifiable