THE ARTICLE · 8 MIN
Amusing Ourselves to Death is Neil Postman’s argument that television changed how Americans talked about everything that matters, not only what they watched. This summary gives the book’s main ideas in our own words. It then sets eight of its claims beside later research and the historical record. His central worry has held up better than some of the history he used to make it.
About the book
Viking first published the book in 1985. Penguin’s 2005 edition, out on 27 December 2005, runs to 208 pages and adds an introduction by Andrew Postman.
Neil Postman (1931–2003) chaired the department of communication arts at New York University and founded its media ecology program, according to his publisher.
It is a short polemic for general readers: half history of American public talk, half critique of television. Its publisher now presents it as a guide to newer media as well, from the internet to cell phones.
The big ideas
1. Two warnings: Orwell’s and Huxley’s
The foreword sets two novels side by side. In Orwell’s 1984, people are controlled by pain and banned books; in Huxley’s Brave New World, by pleasure and distraction.
In Postman’s summary, “Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” His thesis comes in one line: “This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
2. The medium is the metaphor
Each medium, he argues, favours some kinds of content and makes others hard to say at all. So the shift from print to television changes what counts as a serious public conversation. Part I’s opening chapters build this case, from “The Medium Is the Metaphor” to “The Typographic Mind”.
3. Early America ran on print
He describes a culture built around the printed page, which he calls “a thriving, classless reading culture”. He offers three pieces of evidence:
- High literacy in colonial New England.
- The sales of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
- Crowds who listened to hours of political argument.
At Peoria in 1854, he notes, Lincoln proposed that the audience go home for dinner and come back refreshed for four more hours of talk.
4. The telegraph and the information-action ratio
The telegraph, in his account, made news fast, far-off and disconnected. He coins the “information-action ratio” for the gap between how much we hear and what we can do about it.
Most of our daily news, he argues, is inert: it gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. He calls the result “context-free information”.
5. Everything becomes show business
Postman is clear that entertainment itself is not the problem. “The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.”
Part II applies this to news, religion (“Shuffle Off to Bethlehem”), politics (“Reach Out and Elect Someone”) and school.
6. Being informed without knowing much
He argues that television news is fast cuts and fragments, so television is changing what it means to be informed. The danger he names is not lies so much as misleading information: misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that leaves people feeling informed.
7. Teaching as an amusing activity
In the chapter “Teaching as an Amusing Activity” he turns to children’s television. His target is Sesame Street: “We now know that ‘Sesame Street’ encourages children to love school only if school is like ‘Sesame Street.’”
His worry was less about letters and numbers than about what children come to expect learning to feel like.
What holds up
The cheat sheet sets eight of the book’s claims beside the historical record and later research, one row each. His central worry about news fares best; some of the history behind it is shakier. Three rows need more room.
The Huxley line is Postman’s
The famous lines that begin “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books” are Postman’s own comparison of the two novels, written in his voice in the foreword. They are easy to take for Huxley’s, because the same foreword also quotes Huxley.
That quotation comes from Brave New World Revisited (1958). Huxley was writing about the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press. They had not foreseen mass media “concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal”.
In Huxley’s words: “In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” Postman recasts those early advocates as “the civil libertarians and rationalists”.
The numbers behind “Typographic America”
Both of the figures he leans on are hard to support from the records.
Postman writes that Common Sense, published on January 10, 1776, “sold more than 100,000 copies by March of the same year”. In 2013 the historian Ray Raphael summed up the problem. Only scant print records and no sales records survive, “so we simply do not know how many copies were sold”.
Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print (2007) counted the known printings. She puts the far upper limit at 75,000 copies, and thinks the true number was much less. The pamphlet was widely read; it is the 100,000 figure that cannot be confirmed.
His literacy figure also runs high: “between 89 percent and 95 percent” of men in Massachusetts and Connecticut between 1640 and 1700, based on signatures. The historian Kenneth Lockridge’s study of wills found that as of 1660 only 60% of men signed.
An essay published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts draws on Lockridge. It describes Essex County, Massachusetts, as only about sixty percent literate until the second decade of the eighteenth century. By the end of the colonial period, Lockridge found, New England had gone from little more than half-literate to nearly universal male literacy.
One caution cuts the other way. Because reading was taught before writing, a signature count misses people who could read but not write.
The shrinking sound bite
Postman’s account of news has the strongest later support. A 2016 study in the Journal of Communication summed up the record, citing a 1992 study by Hallin. The average politician sound bite in US election news shrank from 43 seconds in 1968 to about 9 seconds in 1992. It has stayed near that level since.
The same study looked at television news in Germany, Russia and the United States. Shorter sound bites were consistently less likely to include a reason for the opinion given. Less time, fewer reasons given: close to what Postman predicted.
Whether entertainment-style news leaves people less informed is still argued over.
- One 2002 study found that soft news brings politically inattentive people to high-profile stories.
- A 2003 survey found “only very limited evidence that viewers actually learn from soft news”.
- Baum, who wrote the 2002 study, answered in the same journal issue that long-term recall of facts is “an overly restrictive definition of learning”.
The cheat sheet gives both sides.
How to use it
These practices draw on findings that held up, or held up in part, and one draws on the book’s own argument. They describe what some people do; they are not instructions.
- Look for the longer version. Shorter sound bites are less likely to include a reason. When a clip of a politician or expert does the rounds, some people look for the full speech, transcript or interview before forming a view.
- Ask the information-action question. Postman’s own test is: what could I do with this? Some readers use it to decide which news to follow closely and which to skim.
- Notice the format, not just the content. If a serious subject arrives as entertainment, that can be a clue to what has been left out. Our SIFT guide covers quick ways to find the context.
- Check the famous numbers. Even a careful book can carry a figure nobody can trace, as the Common Sense sales show. Our guide to fake quotes and invented sources uses the same habits.
- Keep some long reading in the week. The book’s case rests on the kind of thinking that long, connected argument allows. Some readers set aside time for one long article, chapter or debate a week.
Behind most of these is Postman’s own point: how something reaches you shapes what it can say.
Who it’s for, and who can skip it
It suits readers who want a short, sharp argument about media and public life, from a writer with a point of view. It is a polemic, not a research report. Its history is selective, and some of its figures are weaker than its argument.
Readers who want the ideas without the dated television examples can read the foreword, the cheat sheet above and the last chapter, “The Huxleyan Warning”.
If you liked this
- The Demon-Haunted World, summarised — Carl Sagan’s 1995 defence of scientific thinking, which shares Postman’s worry about the “30-second sound bites”.
- Information Is Power — who to listen to, and how to choose what you feed your mind.
- How to Check Something Online Before You Share It — the SIFT method, step by step.
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958) — the essay Postman quotes.
Sources
- N. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (Viking, 1985; Penguin edition, 2005): short passages confirmed through Open Library search-inside of the 2005 Penguin edition; publisher’s page; Open Library record of the 1985 Viking edition.
- A. Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (Harper, 1958): short passages confirmed through Open Library search-inside.
- A. Lincoln, Speech at Peoria, 16 October 1854 (Collected Works, vol. 2); National Park Service, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
- K. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (Norton, 1974), via Open Library search-inside; ""Heated” Speech and Literacy in Seventeenth-Century New England”, Colonial Society of Massachusetts; J. Lepore, The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), via Open Library search-inside.
- R. Raphael, “Thomas Paine’s Inflated Numbers”, Journal of the American Revolution (2013); S. Casper, review of T. Loughran, The Republic in Print, H-Net.
- D. Hallin, “Sound Bite News”, Journal of Communication (1992); E. M. Rinke, “The Impact of Sound-Bite Journalism on Public Argument”, Journal of Communication (2016), author’s preprint.
- M. Baum, “Sex, Lies, and War”, American Political Science Review (2002); M. Prior, “Any Good News in Soft News?”, Political Communication (2003); M. Baum, “Soft News and Political Knowledge: Evidence of Absence or Absence of Evidence?”, Political Communication (2003).
- D. Anderson, A. Huston, K. Schmitt, D. Linebarger and J. Wright, “Early childhood television viewing and adolescent behavior: the recontact study”, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (2001).
- M. Kearney and P. Levine, “Early Childhood Education by Television: Lessons from Sesame Street”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2019); M.-L. Mares and Z. Pan, “Effects of Sesame Street”, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology (2013); University of Wisconsin–Madison, news release (2013).
- Pew Research Center, News Platform Fact Sheet (2025).
Checked October 2026. What we read: the publisher’s page, the book’s table of contents and short passages from the 2005 Penguin edition (through Open Library’s search-inside, a line or two at a time), the same for Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited, Lincoln’s Peoria speech, and the studies and articles listed above, at least their abstracts. We did not read the whole book. If you can show any of this wrong, with a source, write to [email protected].
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