In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman focuses on how television is reshaping our culture. Politics, news, sports, religion, and education have all been transformed into a format of entertainment. Americans favor all who has the talent to amuse. The average length of a shot on television is only 3.5 seconds. Our eyes always has something new to see. Watching television requires minimal skills to understand and is directed at emotional gratification.
“The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.” A news show is just another format for entertainment instead of educating. So many of us say school is boring because now the classroom is a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be amusing to students. Every time we’re allowed to do anything in class we immediately whip out of phones to check who texted us and to see who just followed us. Are we just going to fall into a mindless society with no desire to obtain relevant information? How can we prevent this from happening?
If we continue to make everything about entertaining this will eventually lead us to amusing ourselves to death.
I agree with you when you use the example that we favor people who have talent. People will pay so much money to watch people who can sing or play a sport or make us laugh. We even favor people who may not have a talent, take youtube for example we are entertained by people doing something as simple as eating. Honestly one day we may fall into a mindless society because we won't want to retain valuable information anymore we will just be able to search up anything.
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