Will We Entertain Ourselves into Stupidity?

                In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman masterfully demonstrates the effect of the shift from printed word to the images on television. He claims that since our opinions are now being formed by what we see on television instead of what we read in books, images have become more important to us than words. One of his strongest examples is that of presidential candidacy; in today’s culture, overweight men have no decent shot at the presidency. Postman points out: “the grossness of a three-hundred-pound image, even a talking one, would easily overwhelm any logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech” (Postman 7).  Even though the image onscreen may be speaking sensibly and may have great ideas, we cannot overcome dislike of the image, and therefore discount the man as a valid candidate. His underlying thesis in the chapter, I believe, is that the shift from print to television has robbed us of some of our thinking capacities. Print has traditionally been the basis for higher thinking and learning, forcing us to visualize and understand what is meant by the words on the page. Postman claims that the acceptance of the television has made that irrelevant. The television requires no digestion; it merely feeds us information through our vision, which we then use as “metaphors” that redefine many parts of our culture.  Even in today’s culture, I think this argument holds a lot of water, except it could be applied to the transition between books and the Internet, or television and the Internet. The “mediums” of television and books have been combined into one ever-available hybrid. If given the chance to observe modern society, I believe that Postman would still hold firm to his “amusing ourselves to death” theory. I believe this cryptic phrase means that we are losing the skills of thought by just taking what the television or the Internet gives us and failing to take the time to comprehend the implications before we let it shape our thoughts. We are so obsessed with amusing ourselves through visual images on the television, or today, the Internet, that we don’t grasp how the medium affects our formation of metaphors, which in turn shape our conception of the world around us.  Since all of our metaphors are formed by and through mediums, we have to be exceedingly careful about the mediums we choose to influence ourselves with. While the Internet and television are great amusement and entertainment devices, I agree with Postman as to the fact that the printed word has and should be our primary medium of thought formation.