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Amusing Ourselves to Death | Summary & Notes - Will Patrick

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This book should be read by anyone who has used, is using, or intends to use the internet. Remarkably prescient and an indispensable volume for understanding our current media landscape. Postman sets out to develop the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, famous for his assertion that "the medium is the message." Namely, as McLuhan had argued, "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication." Postman goes further: the medium isn't just the message but rather it is the metaphor. That is, the media we use have a way of organising and transforming the ways we think to begin with. He presents the humble clock as an example. A clock is a medium for understanding the passage of time, and its products are seconds, minutes, and hours. Our minds are organised by this so that it creates a transformation in our way of thinking about time (something that we used to think of as continuous rather than discrete). This transfor

Amusing Ourselves to Death | Summary & Notes - Will Patrick Skip to main content Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman 10/10 Read November 2023 culture Should be read by anyone who uses the internet. Remarkably prescient and indispensable for understanding our current media landscape. "Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death." (Page 4) The medium isn't the message, it's the me

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