AOTD: Who knew television affected us that much?

This has to be the most eye opening book that I have ever read. I admit that I was a big fan of television and still am, but Postman's message on how people should view television has really gotten across to me. Along with being eye opening, it is also one of the most difficult books I have ever read. I found myself having to reread certain paragraphs and using a dictionary to look up certain words, especially in the beginning when he was trying to introduce the concept that different forms of media affect the way that a society forms or how truth is formed through different forms of communication. As I continued to read, I found myself thinking about most of the ideas that Postman mentioned when he described the different ways television's entertainment is influencing us, especially his reference to the "news of the day" and how much information that we do receive is sort of pointless since is does not affect our lives directly.

Spoiler alert to any who have not read the second part of the book. When he talks about entertainment in education, I kind of already knew what point he was trying to get across. Almost no student can sit through a period of lecture without being somewhat entertained, as was the case for the first twenty minutes in AP World History a lot of the times.  When reading about this, the idea that really stood out to me when Postman argues "learning" through television such as in "Sesame Street", is that children are really learning how to love television instead learning the love of going to school or getting an education. His discussion of how television and its entertainment is affecting religion by not allowing the viewer of certain religious programming to fully be embraced because of interrupting commercials and the simple ways one can become detached is the newest way for me to see how television can affect the discourse of our society. 

After finishing the book, I have tried to question what television actually is and how it affects me directly but I am sort of having trouble because of my long time love with its mindless entertainment I think has gotten to me or probably because television does not affect me at all. Postman does a great job in explaining how television and its Age of Show Business has affected the various forms of our lives, in my opinion, mostly in education and religion. During the end of the book, I found myself questioning what would be the best ways to fix the problem of entertainment within television when trying to get across an actually meaningful question without the audience falling asleep such as the case in most lectures.  What impressed me the most when reading is the relevance that most of his arguments have nowadays and whenever I am not reading about an 80's reference, I kept on reminding myself that Amusing Ourselves to Death was written almost thirty years ago.