He is an academic, public intellectual, and cultural critic who writes about American culture and the media. In 2025, he released Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, his most recent book. What was Neil Postman’s opinion of technology? Postman’s most well known book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, explores the decline of high culture in American society as popular culture predominates.

neil postman books Postman is an award-winning author of multiple books. Questions that are still essential anchors in the era of immersive virtual worlds, algorithmic feeds, and AI tutors. Later in life, he focused more intently on technology and education. Even so, his tone remained upbeat. He thinks that the way we live, work, and interact with one another has been transformed by technology. In this book, he argues that the medium (television) determines the message (content). Neil Postman is the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book about the effect of the television on society.

According to the author, we are overly preoccupied with social media and the internet, which has led us to lose sight of the things that are truly important in life, like friends, family, and employment. Neil Postman believed that we should return to the fundamentals. According to Postman, there were three distinct periods of entertainment in American culture: the print era (1700–1940), the visual media era (1940–present), and the upcoming Internet culture era.

Postman believed that the development of entertainment was what made American society unique. What was Postman’s perspective on the history of American society? When news becomes entertainment, when political discourse gets reduced to soundbites and image management, we lose our capacity for the sustained, linear thinking that complex problems demand. The distinction is that, in contrast to today’s media environment, television from the 1980s seems archaic.

At least TV shows had beginnings, middles, and ends. Distraction has become the norm in the environment we’ve created. The difference is that our current media landscape makes 1980s television look quaint by comparison. Postman believed that the world he lived in was drastically different from that of the time when The Gutenberg Galaxy was written. 1992 saw the release of Technopoly’s first edition. and, as a result, alters society’s values and social structure.

Postman argued that children are treated as consumers rather than as learners. Postman claims that because technology has made That views the teacher as nothing more than a As a result, kids are now able to shop for schools and teachers, turning them into paying customers whose interests are met. McLuhan’s 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy served as the inspiration for this piece.