Amusing Ourselves to Death

In 1985, Neil Postman published his highly influential book ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death.’ The central idea in the book is that contemporary civilization, or lack thereof, is not heading towards an Orwellian future in which state power is omnipresent and oppressive, but rather, towards a future that will be characterized by a cornucopia of pleasure which anesthetizes the masses into submission. Simply put, Postman predicted that we were headed for the future presented in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World rather than towards the Big Brother Society presented in George Orwell’s 1984.

Postman directed his barbs against a media form that was appropriately christened as the idiot box in the 1950s. Postman sided with thinkers of his day who were of the opinion that television encouraged passive consumption rather than active analytical reasoning. Postman posited that in the television age, truth was what looked good, felt good, and was most entertaining. According to Postman, television transformed religion, politics, news, and education into entertainment.

Postman predicted culture-death occasioned by the tendency of the masses to be distracted by trivia and addicted to entertainment. Postman stated; “when, in short a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture death is a clear possibility.”

In the closing pages of the book, Postman insists that education must teach children how media works so that they understand the potential of television to distort reality. Interestingly enough, Postman was adamant that societies must consciously keep serious modes of discourse, inclusive of print and long form argument, alive.

It may seem strange to us today that Postman thought that a big wooden box with just one or a few channels that went fuzzy when the rain fell and that signed off around midnight would be the death of us all and the catalyst for the destruction of the modern way of life. Postman must however be jumping and screaming in his grave now that we have invented a way to carry the idiot box around with us in our pockets and to use that box to connect ourselves with the rest of the world in real time around the clock.

Thanks to social media, politics has become a veritable circus. When the lawn of the citadel of Anglo-American power-the White House- could be booked by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) for a battle royale, that is a big clue that Postman hit a bullseye on the transformative nature of mass media. A bemused global village watched a US presidential debate in which a leading presidential candidate who with a serious and straight face, claimed that Haitians were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.

The subsequent endorsement of Donald Trump as the 47^th president of the United States vindicates Postman in his assessment about public business becoming a vaudeville act and the ensuing culture-death.

As scrolling becomes the most pervasive form of social media engagement, content providers are being forced by the unrelenting logic of social media algorithms to produce more condensed versions of their content material. Today, if a talking head on social media speaks for more than 45 seconds without a jump cut, viewers assume that the talking head has had a stroke and they move on to something else.

To demonstrate the inanity of the news, Postman describes a set in which a genocide in Lebanon was followed by a commercial for deodorant and a water-skiing squirrel, all presented by the same smiling anchor with the same bouncy music. In Postman’s day, the news was presented once usually around 6:30 pm. Today, we get news hundreds of times a minute guided by an algorithm whose mantra is, ‘keep them watching or die.’

Postman exhibited a disdain for the popular Sesame Street television program. He argued that Sesame Street taught children the dangerous lie that learning should always be entertaining. Comparatively speaking, Tic Tock would be like Sesame Street on crack. While Postman decried that idea that education should be entertaining, social media goes a step beyond that by teaching us that if it is not entertaining in the first few seconds, it is not worthy of our attention.

An etymological study of the word amusing as used by Postman in the title of his book reveals that Postman may have been pulling a prank on his readers. His book title did not say oppressing ourselves to death or starving ourselves to death. He instead chose amusing ourselves to death. This sounds so inoffensive, harmless, and pleasant. Amusement however, comes from a- meaning not and muse -meaning think Literally, this is another way of saying not thinking ourselves to death.

Ours is without doubt the most informed generation in African and Caribbean history. Regrettably, too many of us are drowning in ignorance while floating on rivers of information. We cannot meme our way to food security neither can we dance or dribble our way to the construction of needed infrastructure. Nollywood makes more movies than Hollywood. Afrobeats run Coachella. Dancehall runs Tic Tock.

Africa and the Caribbean are arresting the attention of the rest of the world. The million-dollar question is what will we do with the attention we have garnered. Amusing or not thinking ourselves and the rest of the world to death is no recipe for rebirthing Black civilization. Accelerating the rebirth and development of Black nationhood is hard, boring work. No background music. No filters. Just hard backbreaking work which constant social media engagement mitigates against. A better developmental paradigm is needed to affect the rebirth of Black civilization and Neil Postman points us in the right direction.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of The Rebirth of Black Civilization: Making Africa and the Caribbean Great Again.