Amusing Ourselves to Death: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Postman recounts to his reader the debates that took place between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in August 1858. Douglas spoke for one hour, then Lincoln replied for an hour and a half—and this was one of their shortest debates. Postman wonders “What kind of audience was this?” He marvels at the ability of Lincoln and Douglas’s audience to sit through hours of oratory from people who were not even, at the time, officially presidential candidates. Postman is confident that contemporary audiences could never give their time and attention the way then-audiences did.

Postman also analyzes the speech of Lincoln during the debate. Postman quotes a particularly long and logically complex sentence from Lincoln, and notes that contemporary politicians are far less likely to speak like this—either because they can’t, or because they are wary of being incomprehensible. People of television culture, says Postman, need “plain language.” This sets us apart in a fundamental way from 19th century Americans, for whom “the use of language as a means of complex argument was an important, pleasurable and common form of discoursein almost every public arena.”

Postman then says it is important to remember that the written word “has a content” that is semantic and paraphraseable. He notes that this may sound odd or obvious, but contends that it is important to his argument. The fact that writing has a paraphraseable content means that it inherently asks to be understood: to be worked through and grappled with by its audience. This is why Postman calls the language of print “serious business.” It is, according to him, fundamentally rational. “It is no accident,” he writes, “That the Age of Reason coincided with print culture.”

Postman then extrapolates that great men of the past—thinkers, orators, politicians, intellectuals—were required to be well-versed and logical, and their audiences were required to do the work of understanding printed language. He notes that great preachers of the 18th and 19th centuries were all men who were exceedingly well-versed in scripture, and whose appeal grew out of their refined intellect. He compares this to the contemporary, commodified “megachurch” figures whose zealotry is often precisely anti-intellectual.

Postman then shifts his attention to advertising. As with all other spheres of culture, advertising was more serious in the age of reason than it is in contemporary culture. “Advertising was, as Stephen Douglas said in another context, intended to appeal to understanding, not to passions.” But Postman argues that with the decline of print culture, it was no longer safe for advertisers to assume the rationality of their audience. Instead, they had to appeal to emotion, psychology, and aesthetic sensibility—reason was left by the wayside.

Postman moves into a more in-depth discussion of contemporary “image culture.” He says that once upon a time, citizens would have associated the names of great thinkers with their prose style or handwriting. But now that technologies of image have proliferated, we associate the names of thinkers and politicians—like Einstein or John F. Kennedy—with images of their face, either in a photograph or on a television screen. This, Postman opines, is the replacement of print culture by television or image culture. We can’t remember the rational content of a person’s work—we only think of their image.

Postman continues to lay out reasons why print culture was once so strong. Before electricity, he argues, time for reading was compressed. Whatever daylight a person had to make use of, they would make use of deliberately and with concentration. Reading was done carefully and attentively. There was no such thing as absent-minded reading of perusing, says Postman. Reading and comprehending were always the same thing. But at the end of the nineteenth century, reading was sundered from comprehension, attention span grew shorter, and the “Age of Show Business” began to take shape.