A Huxleyian Warning Pt. 02

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

The book originated with Postman's delivering a talk to the Frankfurt Book Fair 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 reality was reflected more by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World where the public was oppressed by pleasure than Orwell's 1984 where they were oppressed by pain.

http://www.recombinantrecords.net/2009/05/24/amusing-ourselves-to-death/

Roger Waters' 1992 album "Amused to Death" was, in part, inspired by and deals with some of the same subject matter as Postman's book. In The End of Education Postman remarks that the album had "elevated my prestige among undergraduates", and notes that he has no "inclination [to repudiate Roger Waters or his kind of music] for any [...] reason". However, he describes that "[t]he level of education required to appreciate the music of Roger Waters is both different and lower than what is required to appreciate, let us say, a Chopin étude ... Most American students are well tuned to respond with feeling, critical intelligence, and considerable attention to forms of popular music, but are not prepared to feel or even experience the music of Haydn, Bach, or Mozart; that is to say, their hearts are closed, or partially closed, to the canon of Western music ... There is in short something missing in the aesthetic experience of our young."

It has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition. It is regarded as one of the most important texts of the Media Ecology school of criticism.

http://www.neilpostman.org/

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• Huxleyian Warning Pt. 01
• Huxleyian Warning Pt. 02

[NgrH8r]

fuck you

[ShermerIllinois]

The first option sounds a lot like The Onion News Network. In that respect it could be argued that they are doing a greater public service that CNN.

[Pdrum2]

Read academic books don't don't watch tv

[JamesNealFox]

One of your best made vids, but I'm not big on the TV-is-eating-our-brains-thing. It's an aspect of a condition that was already there before TV, and this excerpt builds a polemic as if it is the entire issue.

Also I find it ironic that it's Huxley who is being extolled, and yet you choose to lump LSD sugar cubes as part of the general dumbing down process.

Huxley's Doors of Perception was a cornerstone of the psychedelic scene in the 1960s.

I could say more.