Entertainment and is dangerous



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Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death



Postman doesn’t just criticise the content of television; he attacks the medium itself. For him, television is inextricably linked with entertainment and is dangerous when it attempts to be serious. He argues that television has reduced our ability to take the world seriously. (Bear in mind that his attack is based on American television)
Postman’s concern is that everything that was important has been reduced by television to a level of trivial entertainment - politics, religion, news, athletics education and commerce. We are in the process of ‘amusing ourselves to death.’
For Postman, television provides the explanation for a world obsessed with image to the detriment of content. He argues that television conveys its dialogue in images, not words. ‘Its form works against the content.’
In the same way that a Cherokee Indian cannot philosophise with smoke signals, television as a form demands a certain lack of content. He connects his work with Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism, ‘the medium is the message.’
Postman saw the advent of the

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