To reflect on the question “Is Postman’s argument relevant in the internet age?”, I feel it is even more relevant. The assertions he wrote about to which I found most relating to today’s internet is the attention span we are limited to and that everything on TV is created as entertainment. The attention spans that entertainment companies have to tend to when creating the guidelines of entertainment has not changed. For example, Tik Tok is an application that allows endless scrolling of videos with an average length of 34 seconds. This is similar to the argument Postman made in saying that television shows and advertisements have windows of 7-8 seconds to display a particular image or depiction before the camera switches angles. Anything longer and your viewer’s attention is lost. It scares me to know that our ability to change the channel or swipe to the next video is extremely and effortlessly easy. This makes me wonder what we will never be able to focus on in the future. The second assertion I found relevant was the argument that everything put on a screen is made for our entertainment. A comment that made me chuckle and immediately think of this book is when I judged my sister in saying “that’s entertaining for you?” when I saw her watching someone play with slime on YouTube. After thinking about this for a while, I realized that someone could say the same for me. And that someone could have the same thing said for them about what they choose to watch as entertainment. For me, I am genuinely entertained watching someone do their morning makeup and talking about an argument they had with a friend. Who is this women? Why do I care to spend my time watching her? These are questions I raised to myself after thinking about his assertion that anything can be used and everything is used, as entertainment. It also reminded me about how breaking the spell can minimally mean questioning our environments. These ideas provoke the thought that nothing we watch can be put under a different category of entertainment. Everything to do with TV or social apps is of the same value, stupidity, and extent of wasted precious time.
I believe that Postman’s critique of society in 1985 lines up with Huxley’s critique of society in the 1930s through their cooperating ideas of soma and the dramatic change in our understanding of relevance and applicability towards entertainment. I found a connection between Postman’s essay and Huxley’s novel in their formulation of describing how we deal with sadness or stress. In Brave New World the characters take a medicinal “soma” that has been made to immediately take away the emotional and physical effects of unpleasant human emotions. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he describes our numbing of unpleasant emotions as watching TV. It has occured to me as a result of reading this book that when we feel something, or encounter something we don’t know how to deal with, we find comfort in distracting our brains with television. It is interesting to me that both Huxley and Postman comment on how society attempts to make uncomfortable feelings disappear. Well, disappear for long enough to forget about them. The second critique I correlated between the two was that everything we are presented is for the sole purpose of amusement and therefore leads to a lack in our emotional reactions. It is evident that Postman attempts to explain the different instances where serious matters become entertainment. These instances being religion, education, and politics. One of his example is that a person can watch the news on a massacre somewhere in the world and still sleep silently that night. His point led here is that by putting events and information on TV, it degrades the value and emotional response it should spark. From this, I have come to realize that this is similar to in BNW where Huxley writes about how the citizens laugh at any play put on for them. Whether the plot is a tragedy or comedy. In my opinion this connection can be related into our futures as, curiosity did not kill the cat, oblivion did.