Amusing Ourselves to Death by the late Neil Postman had a significant influence on many of his colleagues when it was first published. As one of his contemporaries, I recommend it and include samples below to whet your appetite to read the book yourself.

Fortunately, in 2006, his son, Andrew Postman, speaking to a new generation of readers, wrote the Introduction to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition:

"Now this? -- A book of social commentary…published 20 years ago? You’re not busy enough writing emails, returning calls, downloading tunes, playing games (online, PlayStation, Game Boy), checking out websites, sending text messages, IM’ing, Tivoing, watching what you’ve Tivoed, browsing through magazines and newspapers, reading new books – now you’ve got to stop and read a book that first appeared in the last century, not to mention millennium?

Come on – like, your outlook on today could seriously be rocked by this plain-spoken provocation about The World of 1985, a world yet to be infiltrated by the Internet, cell phones, PDAs, cable channels by the hundreds, DVDs, call-waiting, caller ID, blogs, flat-screens, HDTV and iPods?

Is it really plausible that this slim volume, with its once-urgent premonitions about the nuanced and deep-seated perils of television, could feel timely today, in the Age of Computers?

Really, could this book about how TV is turning all public life (education, religion, politics, journalism) into entertainment; how the image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and how our bottomless appetite for TV will make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we’ll be overwhelmed by “information glut” until what is truly meaningful is lost and we no longer care what we’ve lost as long as we’re being amused…

Can such a book possibly have relevance to you and The World of 2006 and beyond?
I think you’ve answered your own question."

From:Amusing Ourselves to Death: Postman leads off with two chapters of theory how the different media shape how we see the world, then two chapters more describing the early history of America as being based on the printed word:

"From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge edge'." To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph graph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.

I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word analytic thought was not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don't notice, or even worse, don't care. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective. rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content....

For two centuries, America declared its intentions, expressed its ideology, designed its laws, sold its products, created its literature and addressed its deities with black squiggles on white paper. It did its talking in typography, and with that as the main feature of its symbolic environment rose to prominence in world civilization.

The name I give, to, that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition. Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with 'mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction, a large capacity for detachment and objectivity-, and a tolerance for delayed response. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for reasons I am most anxious to explain, the Age of Exposition began to pass, and the early signs of its replacement could be discerned. its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business." (pp. 51, 63)

Then Postman established the impact of telegraphy and photography in the late nineteen century had on the discontinuity of language.
Telegraphy provided instant information, fast facts from all over, "news" without context or meaning, ("irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence"):"The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it."

Add to this, the impact of photography, Postman writes

It is the custom to speak of photography as a "language. " The metaphor is risky because it tends to obscure the fundamental differences between the two modes of conversation. To begin with, photography is a language that speaks only in particularities. Its vocabulary of images is limited to concrete representation. Unlike words and sentences, the photograph does not present to us an idea or concept about the world, except as we use language itself to convert the image to idea. By itself, a photograph cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract. it does not speak of "man," only of a man; not of "tree," only of a tree. You cannot produce a photograph of "nature," any more than a photograph of "the sea." You can only photograph a particular fragment of the here-and-now-a cliff of a certain terrain, in a certain condition of light; a wave at a moment in time, from a particular point of view. And just as "nature" and "the sea" cannot be photographed, such larger abstractions as truth, honor, love, falsehood cannot be talked about in the lexicon of pictures. For "showing of" and "talking about" are two very different kinds of processes. "Pictures," Gavriel Salomon has written, "need to be recognized, words need to be understood. By this he means that the photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea. For even the simplest act of naming a thing is an act of thinking - of comparing one thing with others, selecting certain features in common, ignoring what is different, and making an imaginary category There is no such thing in nature as 'man" or "tree. " The universe offers no such categories or simplifications; only flux and infinite variety. The photograph documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible....(p.72)

a peek-a-boo world

[P]hotography and telegraphy set the key [of a new era.] Theirs was a . "language" that denied interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued the irrelevance of history, explained nothing, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence. Theirs was a duet of image and instancy, and together they played the tune of a new kind of public discourse in America. Each of the media that entered the electronic conversation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries followed the lead of the telegraph and the photograph, and amplified their biases. Some, such as film, were by their nature inclined to do so.

Others, whose bias was rather toward the amplification of rational speech -- like radio - -were overwhelmed by the thrust of the new epistemology and came in the end to support it. Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world -- a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a' moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child's game of peek-a-boo, entirely, self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining. (77)

"Now ... This"

"The phrase, if that's what it may be called, adds to our grammar a new part of speech, a conjunction that does not connect anything to anything but does the opposite: separates everything from everything. As such, it serves as a compact metaphor for the discontinuities in so much that passes for public discourse in present-day America.

"Now ... this" is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly -- for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening -- that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, " Now ... this." (p. 99)

"The fundamental assumption of that world is not coherence but discontinuity. And in a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist. My point is that we are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the "Now . . . this" world of news -- a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or 'to other events -- that all assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply disappears. And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then? It is merely a rehash of old news, and there is nothing interesting or entertaining in that. The only thing to be amused about is the bafflement of reporters at the public's indifference. There is an irony in the fact that the very group that has taken the world apart should, on trying to piece it together again, be surprised that no one notices much, or cares.

For all his perspicacity, George Orwell would have been stymied by this situation; there is nothing "Orwellian" about it. The President does not have the press under his thumb. The New, York Times and The Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass. And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference. Which is why Aldous Huxley would not in the least be surprised by the story. indeed, he prophesied its coming. He believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil's observation that "television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. " Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody." (pp.110-111)
FYI: Remembering Neil Postman, 1931-2003. This site, rememberingneilpostman.com , has links, recollections by fans of his writing, and some video. Neil Postman Online has links to his writings on the Web, and writings about him.
Postman follows in the tradition of Aldous Huxley whose Brave New World (1931) -- science-fiction novel? fable? -- predicted a world in which the masses were distracted from serious thought by means of non-stop entertainment, sex, and drugs. Later, in his 1958 non-fiction analysis Brave New World Revisited, Huxley pointed out how quickly many of his predictions were coming true.
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