Neil Postman and our Huxleyan dystopia

Photo Courtesy of RF._.studio- Pexels

Neil Postman was a luddite in a rapidly evolving world. He lived in an era when eschewing technology was still an option for educators, and he knew this luxury was short-lived. He is best known for writing Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Although it was written as a work of media theory, it reads more like a horror novel. In this book, he argues that Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World  is overlooked in a society where everyone is worried about Orwell’s 1984.

Although Postman’s focus in Amusing Ourselves to Death is network television, I would posit that the contents of this book equally apply to social media and AI, arguably more so. 

Postman spends the early majority of the book explaining how technological advancement shapes social consciousness and guides evolution of behavior in the Western world. Early developments in human autonomy, such as eyeglasses or the clock, are monumental inventions that showed we can take dominion over forces we thought as belonging to the divine.

As society advances, the written word becomes the primary mode for critical thought. Postman writes that the aforementioned clock “made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers.” Similarly, the written word allows us to freeze speech and take dominion over thought, therefore giving birth to the trivium of critical thinking: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. 

According to The Getty Museum, we can date the first instances of the written word back to Ancient Mesopotamia. However, it was not until the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century that the idea of widespread literacy became anything more than a fantasy. 

The printing press made the Enlightenment possible and laid the foundation for early America. According to Kenneth A. Lockridge’s Literacy in Colonial New England literacy rates among white males in the New England colonies were close to 85 percent in 1760 and approached 50 percent among white females. This was among the highest in the world at the time and near double that of Great Britain. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense was purchased by approximately 20 percent  of the American population, selling nearly 500,000 copies within a year, as seen in an article from Constitution Daily.

All this to say, critical thinking is writing. Even if the writer is a terrible person, an imbecile, or both, it is very difficult to say nothing with an English sentence. As Postman puts it on page 123 of Amusing Ourselves the Death, “whenever language is the principle medium of communication—especially language controlled by the rigors of print—a fact, a claim, is the inevitable result.”

Flash forward to the present. How did we get here? Why is literacy on such a sharp decline? Why is everyone burnt out? Why is the political sphere a mess? 

The answer starts with the telegraph. 

The telegraph brought about context free information. Authors of the past were writing to contribute to a canon, a lineage. To burn a book was an act of violence against reason. The telegraph on the other hand “demands that we burn its contents,” as found on page 70 of Amusing Ourselves to Death. An excess of information makes it a commodity to be bought and sold. The source that can get it the fastest is the one that the readers will buy. 

Think, what did someone in Maine and someone in Tennessee have to communicate during the Expansion and Reform era? Almost nothing. Is it important that both these individuals know that a member of the British parliament died of whooping cough? Does reading that information change their plans for the day? The answer is no. 

The information economy led to a loop of news that served no other purpose than creating more news. A global information network started to take off. At the same time, photo technology had begun to take its first steps. As Postman  notes on page 72 , “The photo documents and celebrates the particularities of the infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible.”  In essence, photos lack the capacity to argue. 

According to the Massachusetts History Society, the first paid advertisement appeared in The Boston News Letter in 1704. It was a real estate listing for land in Oyster Bay, Long Island. It lists information about the land, its acreage, and a contact for further information. Contrast this to the early photo advertisements in the 1920s: children eating cereal with wide eyes and a smile, staged photos of food, and slogans. 

In an image-centered culture, when you think of Ronald Reagan, you do not think of policies or speeches, you think of his face, or maybe his acting career.

This brings us to television. The problem with network television, and social media by extension, is not  the fact that they are entertaining. In fact, these mediums work best when they seek solely to entertain, like a sitcom. The problem arises when we use a medium for something it is not equipped to handle. When educators feel they need to use television and social media to keep students learning, they are unknowingly turning academia into entertainment. When entertainment becomes the standard for information, all information becomes entertainment.

This bleeds into all aspects of life, most notably politics. Televised presidential debates are public theater. They do not demand thought, they demand applause. Once we elected Ronald Reagan, an actor turned politician who won with witty one liners and Hollywood charisma, the stage was set for Trump. Reagan acted like Frank Sinatra walking into a concert hall. Trump acts like Hulk Hogan walking into the ring. They both treat their crowd like fans instead of constituents, appealing to the demographic they know well enough to manipulate. 

Political nihilism comes from treating politics like a sports match, something that becomes a necessity when you campaign elections with a medium that is too easy to turn off.  The news has to have attractive broadcasters, constant stimulation, and abrupt jump cuts, or else you will just change the channel or swipe up. 

In the same way such theatrics have strengthened the view of politics into a form of entertainment, social media has optimized the overload of information started by television. At least crossword puzzles and trivial pursuit gave us the illusion of dominion over our copious amounts of useless information. AI and Social Media are our submission to the system: the spoonfeeding and algorithmic sorting of the unending information we have engineered into our daily lives.  

It is too late to pull the plug, but it is not too late for self awareness. As Postman articulates better than I can on page 163 of Amusing Ourselves to Death, “what afflicted people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they didn’t know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”