Forty years ago, Neil Postman wrote a mildly entertaining book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. He wasn’t trying to be amusing, however. What he really tried to do was warn us about the existential dangers we were facing, as people stopped reading books, and spent more and more of their free time watching TV.
We didn’t stop reading, of course. Mr. Postman ended up selling about 200,000 copies of his book, and many readers read it and found it illuminating. But also entertaining.
Maybe not as entertaining as TV, but close to it.
The book came out in 1985, and Mr. Postman died in 2003. So he had plenty of time to amuse himself in the meantime. Apparently, amusing yourself to death by watching TV doesn’t happen overnight. Even if you stay up late to watch ‘The Tonight Show’.
Mr. Postman wrote that he didn’t believe America was trending towards a dystopia like the one described in George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, which was an easy call to make, since his book came out in 1985. In his view, American democracy was not in danger of being overthrown, but rather, over-amused. He felt that books, by their very nature and characteristics, encouraged reasoning and discernment. Also, they’re useful if you can’t sleep.
TV, on the other hand, reduces complex information into mindless entertainment, by prioritizing emotional impact as packaged into 30-minute or 60-minute “shows”. Mr. Postman foresaw a world where books and literacy, serious social criticism, and maybe democracy itself, would fade into the sunset… replaced by a screen-dominated reality that turns everything into a game of Trivial Pursuit.
TikTok and and other social media platforms have further condensed reality into 3-minute doses of trivia.
Of course, Mr. Postman was only partly right. Books have not disappeared, because the Baby Boomer Generation has not yet amused itself to death. In fact, a good number of books, during the past couple of decades, have outsold the 200,000 books that Mr. Postman managed to sell. The Twilight Saga series by Stephanie Meyers, for example, sold 120 million copies. The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown sold 80 million. Even Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, has sold more than 14 million copies, for heaven’s sake.
Granted, those books are also highly entertaining. So long as we’re still alive.
And a society that wants, most of all, to be entertained, would do well to elect a former Reality TV star as their President… and by God, haven’t we reaped the rewards so far? In terms of amusing ourselves?
I read Mr. Postman’s book several years ago, when I was searching the library shelves for some thoughtful entertainment, and the title caught my eye. But I was recently reminded of his book when I came across a July 2025 article by Ryan Zickgraf published on Unherd.com:
In Postman’s view, once television became the dominant cultural form, it didn’t just reshape entertainment — it reshaped everything. Politics, religion, education, journalism — all began to conform to the imperatives of show business. A sermon became indistinguishable from a TV commercial. A newscast adopted the rhythms of a sitcom. A presidential debate turned into a pageant of postures and soundbites…
Where television reduced discourse to entertainment, social media reduces it to performance and dopamine loops. The metaphor of our age is no longer the flickering image, but the infinite scroll. And the scroll, unlike the TV show, never ends.
The last thing I want to be is part of an infinite scroll. I’m quite comfortable appearing as a columnist on a community news website that does it’s best not to be entertaining, and without killing anyone.
But if you find yourself amused by reading any of my columns, please understand that you do so at your own risk.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.