After he and Vice President J. D. Vance feuded with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump concluded, "This is going to be great television." Neil Postman foresaw the moment.
A lifelong New Yorker, Postman completed his Ed.D. at Columbia University's Teachers College and spent decades teaching communication at NYU. Forty years ago he published Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which showed how technological shifts in our communication have had a deep cultural impact. The work is prophetic. At a time when signing ceremonies for presidential executive orders have become reality television, it behooves us to revisit Postman's work and consider how digital technologies structure our cultural discourse.
Postman's analysis begins with a theory about technology: "In every tool that we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself." On the surface, this may seem self-evident. We create tools to accomplish particular goals, and the way in which we make them reinforces those goals and particular ways of attaining them. But those tools also reinforce ideas implicit in their creation. For example, eyeglasses (invented in the twelfth century) teach us that we can overcome the limitations of our anatomy. And clocks not only tell time but teach us that it is divisible into minutes and seconds. The clock makes man the master of time and makes time something he can put to use. This, Louis Mumford argued, destroyed the authority of eternity in measuring human life and did more to weaken theism in the Enlightenment than Voltaire, Diderot, and their comrades.
Something similar takes place with technologies of communication. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan is famous for his expression "The medium is the message." Postman adapted that to "The medium is the metaphor." By this he meant that our media's power lies not in the direct messages they communicate, but in the ways they subtly make it easier or more difficult to express those messages. "A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world," Postman wrote. "But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality."
Just as a clock contains a philosophy of time, so technologies of communication contain philosophies of rhetoric and knowledge - to use the philosophical term, epistemologies. Print and television direct us to organize our mind, integrate our experience of the world, and express ourselves in particular ways. In so doing, they shape our understanding of what is true and how reality works. When television replaced typography as the center of our culture, Postman argued, the seriousness, clarity, and value of public discourse declined.
To demonstrate this, Postman offers a historical account of America's print culture. Colonial Americans had an exceptionally high rate of literacy, and valued schooling, reading, and print materials across class lines. The colonists and their descendants were "dedicated and skillful readers whose religious sensibilities, political ideas, and social life were embedded in the medium of typography." Printed discourse became the model for all other discourse. Alexis de Tocqueville described a kind of "printed orality" among his American interlocutors: "An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say 'Gentlemen' to the person with whom he is conversing." A few decades later, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas would debate before diverse crowds in ornate oratorical performances lasting hours. In short, print as a technology shaped American tastes, ideas, preferences, and desires.
Print also gave birth to a particular culture. Since it cannot move us by images, Postman observes, print must have "a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content." It thereby encourages rational, serious discourse and the coherent arrangement of facts and ideas. One glance at American newspapers and pamphlets shows that this was not an ironclad rule. There was plenty of scurrilous rumor, invective, and propaganda. But on balance, Postman concludes, the epistemology of print privileged the characteristics of mature discourse: "a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively, and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response."
This began to change with the invention of the telegraph. Postman observes that the telegraph insists on instant conversation over long distances, which requires a different kind of conversation and content from print. It introduced irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence: irrelevance, because the information you receive has little to do with the social context in which your life is embedded; impotence, because the information you receive cannot lead to meaningful action; and incoherence, because the information you receive is discontinuous, removed from its context and any connection to previous ideas. Likewise photography depicts atomized discrete events, but offers no assertions or narratives that could be refuted or disputed. Radio and newsreels operate according to the same logic. Hence, Postman concluded:
Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world - a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child's game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.
Television enlarges the peek-a-boo world. Recall that technology is made for a purpose, and that a medium is the social and intellectual environment that a particular technology creates. Television was made for entertainment, especially emotional gratification. As a medium, Postman argues, television is not just entertaining but "has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience." The problem is not that television entertains us, but that it makes us think that everything must be entertaining. In concrete terms, the problem is not that TV has given us shows like The Sopranos or The Voice for our entertainment. It's that it has made us want politics to look like The Voice. As an epistemology, television teaches us that the world should be structured - or staged - for the sake of our amusement. In this way entertainment becomes the governing metaphor for our discourse, the end that shapes what is easily said or not said.
Postman was especially critical of the way in which television has misshapen politics and religion. He saw the television commercial as a mini-drama - something that makes us feel but not think - that has become the fundamental metaphor for political discourse. What would be the political assumptions of someone who has watched a lot of commercials? Postman writes:
For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures - or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty. Such a person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms of social life.
More specifically, Postman observed, commercials prime citizens to see themselves as viewers, looking to politicians for an image or aura to suit their needs rather than as voters who evaluate political substance. It scarcely needs to be said that these critiques apply to our political culture today.
As for religion, Postman saw television as a kind of idolatry, whether it was the crass televangelism of Jimmy Swaggart or the suave apologetics of Fulton Sheen. This was due to the nature of the medium, not any deficiencies in the performance of the preachers. Not everything can be televised, Postman argued, and there are several characteristics of TV that make it impossible to televise religious experience. First, there is no way to consecrate a sacred space on a television show. Your TV, chair, and living room are profane and cannot be set apart for religious activity. Second, the spectacles of religion - smells and bells, chant, brocade vestments - lead to enchantment; the spectacle of TV leads to entertainment. Third, God is inevitably a supporting character to the presenter's lead, whereas real religion is focused on the worship of the transcendent God. I doubt Postman would be surprised to find these dynamics present in the worship services of some contemporary evangelical Christians.
In 1985, Postman argued that "the psychic, political, and social effects of information are as applicable to the computer as to the television." It behooves us today to ask if this is true. How does the internet shape our expectations of truth, our view of the world, and our desires? Are social and digital media different from television? What are their epistemologies?
Thanks to the internet, the peek-a-boo world has become even more immersive and totalizing. The amount of data we receive is staggering, as are their irrelevance and incoherence. Postman complained of the nightly news cycling from tragedy to tragedy in two-minute segments. Today, you can watch twenty-second reels of raw suffering on TikTok - pure shots of visual and emotional stimulation without any resolution. These constant stimuli move us to act, but they give us little constructive action to take, thereby making us feel impotent and angry.
Social media teach us that the world can be digested into these twenty-second reels or into 280-character bites. As a metaphor, they foster strong surges of emotion but not sustained rational engagement. Postman argued that TV was not conducive to messages of naked hate. This may be true. But in the intervening years, producers across media platforms have learned that outrage holds our attention just as much as positive entertainment. Anger is now one of the defining markers of the internet age, a sign that perhaps digital technologies are different from television - not just in degree but in kind.
Anton Barka-Kay makes a similar argument in A Web of Our Own Making. Instead of digital technology serving as one causal force within the broader horizon of human culture - as television was - it will determine the horizon itself: "The digital is . . . not just another medium in the sequence, but a capacity different in kind - a ready extension of our innate capacities, a medium of attention and will, and in this sense a natural technology." Digital technologies make the peek-a-boo world not just more immersive but more easily remade in our own image. Their metaphor is more closely linked not just to entertainment, but to the connection between your attention and your desire for control.
This control extends to the narratives we believe. No longer do we receive our news from three main networks and a small collection of newspapers. To a degree Postman could never have imagined, we must choose which truths - both facts and values - to believe. A deep hermeneutic of suspicion has replaced trust in central authorities. This is in part a natural consequence of television's metaphor: in a world where truth must be packaged as entertainment, we will grow suspicious of those who trim the truth to fit their packaging. In 2004, Jon Stewart famously excoriated CNN's Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for having a show where partisan hacks traded talking points instead of engaging in substantive debate. Postman would have agreed - but he would have also noted that The Daily Show entertained under the false pretense of being more objective than the news.
There may be exceptions to this rule of decline. Podcasts can be substantive and expository. Substack has given long-form argument a newer, broader platform. But the metaphors of digital technologies continue to impede our ability to think conceptually, sequentially, and objectively - both as individuals and as a nation. This leaves us with a sobering possibility. In recent years, we have seen authors debate the degree to which America was founded as a liberal nation, and the degree to which America requires certain foundations of liberalism in order to flourish. Might certain kinds of the same be true of its media? America's print culture helped create and sustain its democratic order. How far can our society depart from print culture's metaphors before it begins to break down? To borrow from Barba-Kay, can democracy survive its digitalization? If so, it will be thanks to the efforts of citizens who heed Postman's warning and choose to live outside the peek-a-boo world.