Amused to Death

Another interesting thinkpiece...

[T]he Internet and new media forms have re-arranged social, political, and cultural structures. We see it with Twitter. We see it with TikTok. We see it with short-form video. The messages get shorter. An inescapable progression, or digression, of how we communicate, how we understand the society we live in. We communicate via meme, not thoughtful treatise.

We can’t ignore it.

In 1985, Neil Postman wrote of the impact of television,

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result: we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”

What would Neil Postman say today?