Of course, calling all of this “information” is misleading. Perhaps we should call it content, because it’s not all equal and it’s not all equally true. But that’s part of the problem. What happens when you take a populous whose idea of an informed person is someone capable of juggling massive amounts of incoherent and contextless information (by “juggling” I mean, sharing it online with an emotive, self-justifying passion) and submerge them in a limitless morass of content? You will find yourself in intractable impasses, in which even intelligent people cannot be persuaded.
This post is part of a series exploring Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death chapter by chapter. You need not read the book or previous points to appreciate this one. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, part 5 here, part 6 here, and part 7 here. In this essay, I will respond to Chapter 7: “Now… this.”
Writing in 1985, well before the popular advent of cable news, 24/7 news, news tickers, and everything most people pretend to despise about modern news, Postman observed that the news of his day had already transmuted into a jumbled form of incoherent entertainment. The main job of the news was not to inform people, provide nuance, or encourage deeper reflection on any given topic—it was to bounce from thing to thing without logical connection.
I wasn’t alive in 1985, but I grew up watching this sort of news. Anchors bouncing from a murder to a puppy puff piece without mourning the former or explaining how it might be connected to the latter. Postman writes that TV features “a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.”
Of course, the problem has gotten worse. Half of Americans report that they retrieve their news from the great morass of contextless incoherence: social media. The odds of leaping from magic diet to mass shooting to surfing dog to influencer diatribe are high. The question is: What does this approach do to our thinking about serious topics? Postman’s answer in 1985 seems even more apropos in 2024.
“Everyone had an opinion about [every] event, for in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions.”