Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death

History of Media in America
Education for your Edification
Peace Revolution Podcast #25
By: Neil Postman

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Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman.

The book's origins lie in a talk Postman gave in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Orwell's 1984 and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's 1984, where they were oppressed by state control.

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Neil Postman (1931 — 2003) was an American critic and educator. Postman received his B.S. from the State University of New York at Fredonia and his M.A. and Ed.D. from Columbia University. He was the Paulette Goddard Chair of Media Ecology at New York University and chair of the Department of Culture and Communication. His pedagogical and scholarly interests included media and education, as can be seen in many of his seventeen books, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), and End of Education (1995). Postman died in 2003.

• Neil Postman Bibliography
• Propaganda (ETC Vol. 36)
• The Educationist as Painkiller (English Education 1988)
• Language Education in a Knowledge Context (ETC Vol. 37)
• Social Science as Theology (ETC Vol. 41)
• Foreword from Amusing Ourselves to Death
• Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change
• Science and the Story That We Need (from First Things 69)
• A Graduation Speech
• Profile of Philo Farnsworth (from Time Magazine)
• Neil Postman Ponders High Tech (Q&A Forum 1996)
• Informing Ourselves To Death (given at a meeting of the
• "Technology and Education," lecture by Neil Postman 1994.
• The Error of Our Ways (August 1, 1995)
• The American Experiment (September 6, 1995)
• Commentary: Learning in the Age of Television (1985)
• Ray Suarez (from NPR) interviews Neil Postman on the state of contemporary American education standards.
• Neil Postman on the topic "In Search of New Ideas."
• Neil Postman speaks about Media Ecology Education at the SCA conference, Chicago 1973. Part 1 & Part 2. [MP3]