Amusing ourselves to death

The title of this piece is borrowed from the influential 1985 book by NYU professor Neil Postman, who wrote about the dangers of a society guzzling easy-to-digest info-tainment on television as opposed to the more difficult task of conventional reading and writing. He details the corrosiveness of a constant stream of smash-cut 30 second segments [...] The post Amusing ourselves to death appeared first on The Equity .

The title of this piece is borrowed from the influential 1985 book by NYU professor Neil Postman, who wrote about the dangers of a society guzzling easy-to-digest info-tainment on television as opposed to the more difficult task of conventional reading and writing. He details the corrosiveness of a constant stream of smash-cut 30 second segments interspersed with s to the process of rational thought. It’s impossible to form a coherent understanding of the world when context and nuance are eliminated for expediency.

What’s most striking about reading Postman’s work is not the prescience of his takedown of television culture. It’s how quaint his concerns seem in the age of the internet. A chunk of his criticism later in the book relates to how politics and societal discourse more broadly has been dumbed down into 20 second television commercials.

Nowadays it’s what, six seconds before most people flip from one video to the next? If someone could see where we were headed in the mid-eighties and be upset by the entertainment-centric style of television at that time (primitive as it would now seem), what would he have to say about TikTok? What would Postman think about the way in which some people have largely offloaded the responsibility of thinking to a chatbot?

While he concerned himself with the decline in literacy, he also pointed out that by replacing written discourse, television has effectively changed the way we think. “The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry,” he wrote. Look to our political discourse, which has been optimized for flashy slogans, “gotcha” questions and slick video clips.

We can all see the downstream effects of a culture that prizes spectacle and simplicity over careful exposition and nuanced analysis. You can’t stop the march of technology, and trying to mitigate the damage from a society outsourcing a large part of its critical thinking to an algorithm will be a Herculean task. The federal government recently introduced legislation intended to blunt the harms of social media on youth, taking its cues from a recently implemented initiative in Australia that banned those under 16 from accessing a slew of social media sites.

According to a study by Australia’s eSafety commission in March, the majority of youth down under (seven in ten) still had access to social media despite the ban. Is this the kind of regulatory mess we want to import? Age verification comes with an enormous amount of privacy concerns, whether you’re asking users to submit government identification or using some kind of age estimation software, as in Australia.

It’s extremely difficult to believe that a country that struggles to rein in its domestic telecom duopoly will have any chance of meaningfully regulating the titans of Silicon Valley. Especially now that our PM and his team seem to have dropped the whole “elbows up” election schtick to appease our biggest trading partner and the reality television star running the show down there. It remains to be seen, there’s still a host of thorny questions to be ironed out by Canadian lawmakers, as well as the Digital Safety Commission that they’re creating to enforce this legislation.

This essay isn’t intended to argue technical progress is all bad, or that there aren’t positives to be found in our current communication methods compared to the written word. But if you don’t have experience organizing your thoughts into linear sentences to form a coherent statement, you have no chance at meaningfully engaging the world around you. You can only sit back and scroll your feed.

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