Wednesday, May 27, 2009

amusing ourselves to death cartoon

This serious cartoon is a well rendered depiction of some aspects of the final chapter of Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Although nothing beats reading the whole book, the final sentence of Postman's book is a fine summary:
For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking
Some more extensive earlier discussion notes about the question of whether technology is making us dumber or smarter: our intelligence

1 comment:

J Le Rossignol said...

On a slightly different vain, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote about this subject in the 1500s. In the Prince he talks about how to control people. with love or with hate.

And another book you may want to consider is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. But in our world we don't need the firemen to destroy knowledge, it is already disappearing in the sea of trivial information.

We have become so efficient at distracting each other that we have arrived here....