Book Review: Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited, by Lance Strate

Abstract

Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited. Lance Strate. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 170 pp. $159.95 hbk. $39.95 pbk.In equal measures homage, elegy, literature review, and media critique, Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited by Lance Strate is apt reading for students and scholars in media and communication. During his doctoral studies at New York University, Strate was a student of Neil Postman, so Strate's admiration for Postman as a leader in media ecology suffuses this book. Today, Strate teaches communication and media studies at Fordham University and is recognized for his contributions to the field. Amazing Ourselves to Death is a concentrated update of Postman's landmark book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). Strate deftly recaps Postman's original plaints about public mass deterioration of critical thinking via debased e-amusements. Strate updates his former professor's theses, incorporating into his own analysis newly emerging technologies. Strate echoes Postman in theorizing that computerized, quantified modes of media often engender habits of cognitive slothfulness, moral ambivalence, and collective detachment, none of which bodes well for American society.Amazing Ourselves to Death offers an insightful, biographical understanding of how Postman was influenced by authors such as Aldous Huxley, who wrote futuristic novels and essays, notably Brave New World (1932), and wise analysts of propaganda, like Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan. Where Postman distinguished himself as an academic and media critic, and where Strate in this book continues to prod us to see anew, is showing the layered ways freedom is sacrificed for the sake of fun. That said, neither did Postman, nor does Strate here, evince neo-Luddite attitudes. To the contrary, they both value democratizing effects from greater access to information. But Strate urges taking the Postmanian view that each unfolding innovation . . . [has costs] . . . and sometimes what is lost will outweigh what is gained. Strate asks readers to take a chastened double-take at the world's overwhelming environmental and justice issues, and wonder, Will technology save us?Strate, like Postman, argues convincingly that questionable technological processes seem innocuous by being relegated to background status. Who among us notices anymore that everyone we see is holding a cell phone? In our post-Postman technopoly, efficient appurtenances are taken for granted. The normalization of behaviors that counter civic participation includes trading contemplative habits, such as deep reading, for entertaining habits, such as TV watching with simultaneous techno-distractions such as web surfing. Superficial media grabs attention as it creates attention deficits. Strate explains that televisual/cyber pass-times, via the latest wow-factor gadgets propelling them, such as trendy apps, are connected to a collective process of cultural coarsening and political self-delusion. …