Neil Postman on technology and thinking

March 15, 2023

From Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985):

"People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."

And:

"It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions."

And most provocatively:

"When news is packaged as entertainment, it becomes entertainment and nothing more. It is not that we are presented with entertainment instead of news, which would be a serious enough condition, but that we are presented with entertainment disguised as news... When a population becomes distracted by trivialities, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself in the grip of a serious, and often fatal, form of social disease."

— Neil Postman