Intended AudienceTrade
ReviewsThis is a 'must listen' for anyone who hopes to understand what the new 'information society' might be like. A well-produced effort for serious listening., A brilliant, powerful, and important book...This is a brutal indictment Postman has laid down and, so far as I can see, an irrefutable one., A sustained, withering, and thought-provoking attack on television and what it is doing to us...Postman goes further than other critics in demonstrating that television represents a hostile attack on literate culture., [Postman] starts where Marshall McLuhan left off, constructing his arguments with the resources of a scholar and the wit of a raconteur.
Edition DescriptionUnabridged edition
SynopsisIn this eloquent and persuasive book, Neil Postman examines the deep and broad effects of television culture on the manner in which we conduct our public affairs, and how "entertainment values" have corrupted the very way we think. As politics, news, religion, education, and commerce are given less and less expression in the form of the printed word, they are rapidly being reshaped to suit the requirements of television. And because television is a visual medium, whose images are most pleasurably apprehended when they are fast-moving and dynamic, discourse on television has little tolerance for argument, hypothesis, or explanation. Postman argues that public discourse--the advancing of arguments in logical order for the public good, once a hallmark of American culture--is being converted from exposition and explanation to entertainment.