The case for starting with Amusing Ourselves to Death

Abstract

This article builds a case for starting undergraduate media ecology education with reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman’s work puts forward the important and fundamental precepts of media ecology and moves students to think about the connection between medium and content as well as media as environments. The text also illustrates a clear shift in media environments, another building block for understanding media ecology. Most central to the case of starting with this text is that Postman offers a critique of an older media environment, television, which students will find more rhetorically acceptable than criticism of our current digital media environment. Choosing to start with a criticism of an older medium creates space for media ecology pedagogy to thoroughly investigate other media environments.