I recently finished reading Huxley’s Brave New World and Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Upon completing both, I had the overwhelming feeling that people today do not discuss these issues much and that more should be said about the problems they presented.
Huxley’s novel painted a dystopian world that sounded uncomfortably realistic; humans were now systemically conditioned through technology, bred to pursue the extreme delight of pleasure and promote consumerism. Such ideals made me think, “What if that happened in real life? It would probably be a disaster.” (After thinking about it for a while, I realized that it really wasn’t that far from reality). The plot was intriguing, but the cruel and confusing social engineering coupled with the lack of personal responsibility was uncomfortable and, at times, a little more than shocking. The idea of having artificially generated human beings, gestated in laboratory tubes, with assigned functions and without a normal birth, sounded terribly dystopian, but not impossible.
Postman’s book, “Amusing Yourself to Death,” was a strong critique of the influence of television on society. What the author said about the trivialization of data and the decline of critical thinking made me stop and analyze for a moment. The world we live in is not at all far from the world presented by Postman, there is quite a bit of superficial content, this and sensationalism seemed to rule the day. If I don’t like something about this, it is that when tragedies or controversial issues occur, the media works to create a smokescreen (using the resources mentioned previously) so that society downplays it. These books made me think about the possible implications of prioritizing entertainment instead of quality interaction and the consequences we can suffer if something is not done about it.