Amusing Ourselves to Death

Just finished my second read. The things I remembered from my first read shone through even brighter this second time around: the conceit that many of us in the richest parts of the globe are living out some version of Huxley’s fear, rather than Orwell’s; the distinct characteristics of a typographic society as opposed to a digital/visual one; and details about how we produced this decontextualized and trivialized culture of ours — a pattern that was in the process of transforming what politics, religion, and truth meant in his time and has utterly upended what they mean in ours.

My second read hammered home the non-neutrality of tech. A technology is designed to do something, to achieve a specific aim. Even the PC and smartphone, which are as close as we have to universal, and perhaps even neutral, technologies, predispose us to use them in certain ways. We can read and write on them, yes, but we can also use them to transmit and display images and video. It’s safe to say that some use cases are considerably more popular than others, for reasons that Postman argues are not entirely mysterious. Humans, after all, are a very visual species, and reading on a screen (or at all) is quite a bit less compelling to most of us than watching something. The consequences of this, as Postman also points out, have been a “silent revolution” so complete in places that some scarcely believe it has happened at all.

As everything has morphed into into TV on the internet, it makes me wonder what Postman would have made of TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch. I’ve been considering this myself recently, and I hope to write about it in the future.