WULOLIFE
"Amusing Ourselves to Death" Author: [US] Neil Postman Publisher: CITIC Press
"Amusing Ourselves to Death" Author: [US] Neil Postman Publisher: CITIC Press
Couldn't load pickup availability
Description
Introduction · · · · · ·
Contents:
There are two ways to make a culture wither away: one is Orwellian, when it becomes a prison, and the other is Huxleyan, when it becomes a farce.
—Neil Postman
"Amusing Ourselves to Death", first published in 1985, is one of Neil Postman's representative works.
The television age is booming. Television has changed the content and meaning of public discourse. Politics, religion, education, sports, business and any other content in the public domain are increasingly appearing in the form of entertainment and becoming a cultural spirit. Human beings have silently become vassals of entertainment, without complaints and even willingly. As a result, we have become a species that is entertained to death.
George Orwell predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four that human beings would suffer external oppression and lose their freedom; Huxley expressed another worry in Brave New World: people would gradually fall in love with the entertainment and culture brought by industrial technology and no longer think.
"Amusing Ourselves to Death" wants to tell everyone that what may become a reality is Huxley's prediction, not Orwell's prediction; what destroys us is not what we hate, but what we love!
About the Author · · · · · ·
Author: Neil Postman (1931-2003)
A world-renowned media culture researcher and critic, he is one of the most important media culture researchers in the world after McLuhan. He pioneered the media ecology major at New York University.
He believes that powerful media can redefine the real world and even shape the cultural spirit of an era with a hidden but powerful suggestive power. People actually live in a huge metaphorical world created by the media without knowing it, so he developed the theory of "media is metaphor".
Postman has published more than 20 books. Amusing Ourselves to Death and The Disappearance of Childhood are his two representative works, which have been translated into many languages and published.
--------------------------------------------------------
Translated by Zhang Yan
He holds a PhD in Translation from Shanghai International Studies University and teaches at the School of Foreign Languages of Tongji University. He has published several translated papers.
!["Amusing Ourselves to Death" Author: [US] Neil Postman Publisher: CITIC Press](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)