Amusing Ourselves to Death

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“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

Neil Postman

A recent YouGov survey found that 40% of Brits haven’t read a single book in the past year and just 23% have read more than ten. In reality it’s probably fewer given the tendency to exaggerate positive characteristics in self-reported polls.

In the US the equivalent figures were even worse: 46% and 19%. Polling by Gallup indicates the average number of books read by Americans per year fell from 18.5 in 1999 to 12.6 in 2021 and presumably has dropped further since.

Notably the fall was particularly acute amongst graduates, probably because there are more of them and fewer are doing humanities degrees. In the UK, between 2012 and 2021 the numbers doing an English degree fell 23%. History is also down. Foreign languages are an in endangered species in higher education. As universities manage their financial challenges it’s humanities departments that are most likely to be axed. US trends are similar.

We can see the same pattern at A-level. As recently as 2013 more students did English than Maths – now it’s far fewer (50k vs 90k). History has dropped too though not as dramatically. French entries have more than halved since 2001 – ten times more students take psychology.

None of this would be a surprise to the late American academic Neil Postman whose best known book – “Amusing Ourselves to Death” – is forty years old this year. His remarkably prescient argument was that television was fundamentally changing the way we think, forcing a move from a literate culture to a visual one in which entertainment was becoming more important than reason.

He did not claim that television was an inherently worse medium for entertainment – and since the book was published we’ve seen brilliant series like Mad Men and The Wire. Rather, unlike with film, television has colonised every aspect of culture including religion, news and politics, and in doing so made these things an aspect of the entertainment industry rather than something to take seriously.

Whereas a culture focused on words means “following a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning”, one focused on the visual “has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience”. He would not be surprised that the US has a President who was boosted into office by a long-running reality TV series.

Postman does acknowledge that it’s possible to make programmes in a more literate style. By definition, however, these fit the medium worse and so are shunted to times no one will be watching. The truth of this is obvious when one considers political programming which has got progressively degraded in the name of engaging the audience. Last year we were treated to UK election debates in which party leaders were given barely any time at all to respond on complex issues, so inevitably resorted to meaningless catchphrases.

Postman wrote another book in the early 90s worrying about the impact of computers on society and education, but died in 2003 and so never saw how the visualisation of culture has been accelerated by social media. Already by 2023 TikTok was the main source of news for 12-15 year olds in the UK, followed by YouTube and Instagram, and the fastest growing source of news for adults. In the run up to the US election last year Pew found that 17% of adults got news from TikTok, up from just 3% in 2020.

So in the rest of this post I’m going to try and update Postman’s analysis. Are these shifts changing how we think? To what extent is it driving changes in politics? What, if anything, can be done about it?