The Truth Exposed By Amusing Itself To DeathNeil Postman is deeply concerned about what technology can do to a culture or, more importantly , of what technology can undo in a culture. In the case of television, Postman believes that by willingly surrendering to it, Americans are losing the ability to conduct and participate in meaningful and rational public discourse and public affairs. Or, to put it another way, television undoes public discourse and, as the title of his book Amusing Ourselves to Death suggests, we are willing accomplices. Postman bases his argument on the belief that public discourse in America, when governed by the epistemology of printing, was "generally coherent, serious, and rational" (16) because the reader was expected to ingest, understand, and reflect to the logic of the author's arguments before reaching a verdict. Indeed, intelligence in a world based on print “implies that one can live comfortably without images, in a domain of concepts and generalizations” (26). However, with the emergence of television and its rapid ascendancy in our culture, Postman argues that discourse has become "shrivelled and absurd" (16). Television, he says, assail us with fleeting images and scraps of disjointed information, with no context other than "pseudo-context" which is manufactured "to give apparent utility to fragmented and irrelevant information" (76 ). Indeed, television requires a certain type of content – ​​the “media is the message” in the words of Marshall McLuhan – which, according to Postman, is suitable for the world of show business and is hostile to the printed world of logical thought (80). . . This is not to say that television ignores important topics such as current events, politics, religion, science, and middle of paper...rationalized as a necessary means to American expansion; when slavery was justified because blacks were considered less human than whites; when women were denied the right to vote; or when workers and union organizers were beaten by law enforcement and police? Even with these weaknesses, Postman makes a significant contribution to expanding our understanding of television and the epistemology it establishes. He may be too fond of typographic America, but he has some very important things to say about how television works, and we should pay attention to them. Works Cited: McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communications Politics in Dubious Times and Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for Control of American Broadcasting 1928-1935Postman, Neil. Having fun to death. New York: books about penguins, 1985.