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god i love books that a short and straight to the point

interesting takes

although there are some funny takes i found, a lot of these quotes are just INSANELY raw

however, there are some quotes that i think are bad takes

Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods- much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough

idk man, i think russia invading ukraine is infinitely more impact than whatever crap the royal family is up to rn

I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.

VOTING, MOTHERTRUCKER! DO YOU DO IT? YOU'D BETTER!
he even tries to minimize the impact voting has, which is,,, suspicious ngl

There is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context.

has bro never taken a photo before

[I]magine a stranger's informing you that the illyx is a subspecies of vermiform plant with articulated leaves that flowers biannually on the island of Aldononjes. [...] You will, in fact have "learned" nothing (except perhaps to avoid strangers with photographs)

idk this is just a really funny thing to say lol

I have heard (but not verified) but that some years ago the Lapps postponed [their] migratory journey so that they could find out who shot J.R.

that word, he uses, it's literally a racial slur 💀
just take a look at the introductory paragraph on the wikipedia page

All of this has occurred simultaneously with the decline of America's moral and political prestige worldwide.

this book was written during REAGAN.

[Kissinger] was then and still is a paradigm of intellectual sobriety;

that's like
the third book i've read
that thinks kissinger is a good person
what???

I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar.

bro might be trolling in this sentence, but what?
i'm like 99% sure people didn't like him because of his actions...

One would think that the grandeur of the universe needs no assistance from Walter Cronkite.

this is about a tv show that went smth like "the universe w/ walter cronkite," and it's funny just how relevant it still is, what with tyson's cosmos and the green brothers' crash course

What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

laughter. laughter> you sure bout that, chief?
i go on twitter, tumblr or any social media site and it's all mostly brainrot and/or hatred

Although I believe the computer is a vastly overrated technology
a picture of kissinger with the fantastic four

vocab

jesus christ

for as good as this book is, it has a crap ton of giant words i do not know

actual commentary

where did we go so wrong?

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman initially comes off as an "old man yells at cloud" kind of situation, but upon reading it, the author builds a strong argument on the negative effects he believes TV has had on society, more specifically, public and political discourse. At the start of the book, he takes care to make his thesis, that TV has done irreparable damage to the specific area of public political discourse, very clear, and I respect him for that. In a lot of books, I have to pull out the magnifying glass just to actually understand what the author is trying to argue. Although occasionally the logical links fall short, I found myself agreeing with him for the most part. It's interesting how this book still managed to have the general point "technology bad" while still bringing a different POV than the previous book on tech I read, Alone Together by Sherry Turkle.

yeah i'm writing these commentaries out of order lol what u gon do bout it

Before I start though, I'd just like to mention that I found it amusing how Postman never uses the abbreviation "TV" in place of television. Given how often he uses the word, you'd think he'd take the opportunity to save a bit of typing time (or perhaps he wrote drafts by hand, in which case my point is only stronger) and ink, but maybe using the abbreviation makes you come off as uncultured in the world of grad students and PhDs. Who knows? I'm not even into my second year of college yet as I'm writing this.

Postman starts off reminiscing about the good old days back when print used to reign supreme. As stupid as this may sound, he makes a good case for the benefits of a print-only society. If I got his point correctly, back then people communicated solely through print, which allowed for more time to reflect on the content presented. He uses advertisements back then as an strong example. Apparently they used to only consist of text, and as I read them I felt like the advertiser was just trying to make a logical argument as to why I should buy their services. Even though it was short, I found that it needed more of my brainpower than a 15-second YouTube ad could ever require.

He then links the thinking and attention spans people developed while reading pure print to the speeches politicians gave at the time too. He brings up Lincoln-Douglas debates, demonstrating how back then people could listen to logical explanations of political issues for hours on end. According to him, these speeches could last for 2, maybe 3 hours, which is quite amazing. My sorry self can't even pay attention to a 50-minute math lecture without picking up my phone! But in the end I think Postman tries to make the point that back then people had a higher capacity to think, which is a futile point to argue simply due to the state of the world at the time. The 18th and 19th centuries were very xenophobic, racist, imperialistic, and a bunch of other bad things, so did the people back then really have good thinking skills? Even though it wasn't those adjectives as much as previous centuries, I still don't think you can say that people had better critical thinking skills at the time.

An interesting comparison I think that's worth making comes from one of Postman's subpoints that men were judged primarily by the quality of their writing, aka how good their takes were. He says that most people engaged with famous people primarily through works of writing, so even presidents could probably walk along a street in New York without getting noticed. Now, I feel with the rise of social media platforms like Twitter (I will NEVER call it X) and Reddit, we've looped back to judging people by their takes. You don't see the face on the other side of the screen; it's just a profile picture with some text underneath it. But perhaps it's the 140 character limit or the nature of scrolling that the takes we write on these sites have not become detailed analyses of what we really think about the state of the world, but just soundbites (or would textbites be a better name?) that try to get as much attention in the 2 or 3 seconds that users look at our posts.

The next parts of the book talk about how we got from spending meaningful time with books to getting our attention spans absolutely demolished by TV. Postman starts with the telegraph, believing that it was when newspapers started to fill their pages with yapping instead of actual content. This is one of the weakest logical links in this book (though I still personally agree with the results), is that somehow newspapers managed to turn from well thought-out political analysis and opinions to just constant yapping about random stuff and brainrot throughout the nation as soon as the telegraph was invented. It's probably just me, but I fail to understand if there really are any differences in newspapers (besides the ads) before and after the telegraph. These papers probably always had sensational stories, right? Like the Boston Massacre, where only 5 people were killed, was still reported as one because newspapers wanted to rile up their readership!

cool quotes

I also wanted to bring up two particularly raw quotes about world affairs that Postman brought up:

Let us consider, instead, the case of Iran during the drama that was called the "Iranian Hostage Crisis." [...] I put these questions to you: Would it be an exaggeration to say that not one American in a hundred knows what language the Iranians speak? Or what the word "Ayatollah" means or implies? Or knows any details of the tenets of Iranian religious beliefs?

He lists a bunch more questions in this quote, but I think you get the idea. We have a hose of information shoved in our face that gives out a "24/7 spew of trivia and celebrity bullsh*t," as one Senator Armstrong put it, and yet none of it really makes us more informed. I've internalized this belief myself! As early as high school, I would tell people "Look man, I don't actually watch the news to stay informed, I just listen to NPR for the stories and the entertainment." Without the relevant context, this information has no past, no future; it exists only in the present.

This quote also brings up in my mind this Instagram account I used to scroll through to watch people argue in the comments. Way before the current situation in Palestine, this account would post simple infographics that purportedly educate people about the state of the current world. But I reckon you could ask any one of the followers of this account the same sort of questions Postman poses in his questions about the Iranian hostage crisis, and not one of them would have a ready answer. They know what the infographic tells them, maybe a little more from some other TikTok short or news source, and that would be about it. Come to think of it, accounts like these are just overflowing with potential for misinformation.

Another really cool but sad thing I found was this quote Postman brought up from an NYT article. It's not the most balanced news source, I know but it's still worth a look:

Indeed, the President [Ronald Reagan] continues to make debatable assertions of fact but news accounts do not deal with them as extensively as they once did. In the view of White House officials, the declining news coverage mirrors a decline in interest by the general public

You could run this paragraph in '17 or '18 when Trump was in the White House and no one would bat an eye! The thing is, if the public was already taking less interest in presidential lies during the Regan era, who knows how inundated we are to falsehoods in this day and age? O'Brien could probably come onto a press conference, say "2+2=5", and no one would bat an eye. Probably because no one watches CSPAN these days, but still.

education & conclusion

Near the end of the book, I think in one of the final chapters, Postman laments the damage that TV has done to the education system as well:

Television's principal contribution to educational philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable.

Education and entertainment have become inextricably linked in his eyes, and I agree to an extent. This is probably confirmation bias at work here, but I recall when my middle school math teacher (a great teacher by the way, I don't mean to rag on her) got us to sing the quadratic formula. There wasn't any attempt to get us to memorize and understand it through derivation, but instead she thought we would memorize it better if we sung it.

Even in English class senior year (I didn't take AP Lit, yes, I'm a failure of an Asian), my teacher would have us simulate a propaganda campaign for Big Brother to supposedly understand 1984 and make posters showcasing our interpretation of Slaughterhouse-Five. What I certainly do not recall is having to write even a single essay in that class. Granted, no one likes work such as that, but ultimately things like deriving elements of math and writing essays forces one to reflect on the content at hand rather than get lost in how "fun" everything is supposed to be these days.

This isn't to say that we should strive to make everything as boring as possible! I'm obviously not against my physics professor cracking a joke about electric fields every once in a while, but I am against my CS professor forsaking lecture time in favor of trivial "fun" activities that don't really enhance anyone's understanding of algorithms. The point is, enjoyment should not come at the expense of education.

In the conclusion of the book, Postman presents a weird solution that involves having school teach kids on how to somehow consume TV better or whatever. Reminds of current social media people encouraging others to consume media "critically," but they certainly mean it differently than Postman does. I think there's a much simpler solution that is also plainly easier to implement: just ban tech in schools! We can all agree that childhood consists of some of the most formative years of a person's life, so as long as we can develop those logical reading skills and attention span Postman thinks were so critical to his vision of the healthy political discourse back then, then we should be well on our way to a healthier public discourse.

final rating: 8.5/10 great takes intermixed with some questionable ones and decent humor throughout, so i'll place it slightly above the bobos book by brooks