Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of the Screen

Neil Postman

Jan 2027 · Random House

Ebook

208

Pages

Eligible

This book will become available on January 28, 2027. You will not be charged until it is released.

About this ebook

'The world is choking on screens. Just as this book foretold.' – WASHINGTON POST

In 1985, Neil Postman wrote a groundbreaking polemic about the dire effects of television screens on society, ushering us into a dystopia resembling Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It became an instant classic.

Today, we live in an age of social media, screen addiction and artificial intelligence. From the infinite scroll and waning attention spans, to dwindling literacy rates and the loss of critical thinking, Postman's warnings about the dangers of the screen are more prescient than they've ever been.

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a prophetic look at what happens when politics, news, education, and even religion become subject to the demands to what we now know as the attention economy.

With a brand-new foreword written by Jonathan Haidt – the bestselling author of The Anxious Generation – this is the definitive examination of how we are willingly sacrificing our ability to reason in the name of entertainment.

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'The 40-year-old book that predicted today’s dystopian politics.' – TIME

'When you read this book, you have to keep reminding yourself that he’s talking about television and Reagan, not the internet and Trump.' – OBSERVER

'Few writers are prophetic. An American media studies professor called Neil Postman was... His great insight was that the way we entertain ourselves matters.' – THE TIMES

'The world is choking on screens. Just as this book foretold.' – WASHINGTON POST In 1985, Neil Postman wrote a groundbreaking polemic about the dire effects of television screens on society, ushering us into a dystopia resembling Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It became an instant classic. Toda...

About the author

For the last third of the twentieth century, Neil Postman was one of America’s foremost social critics and education and communications theorists, and his ideas and accessibility won him an international following. An influential and revered teacher, he was a professor for more than forty years at New York University, where he founded the renowned Media Ecology program. Blessed with an unusually far-reaching mind, he authored more than twenty books, producing major works on education, childhood, language, news, and technology’s impact on culture. Amusing Ourselves to Death remains his most reverberating and widely read book, translated into more than a dozen languages. He was educated at the State University of New York at Fredonia and Columbia University. He died in October 2003 at the age of seventy-two.

For the last third of the twentieth century, Neil Postman was one of America’s foremost social critics and education and communications theorists, and his ideas and accessibility won him an international following. An influential and revered teacher, he was a professor for more than forty years a...

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