Acton Republican Town Committee

This book was extremely helpful to me to watch so much LESS TV!!

The author points to Abraham Lincoln days as to the time-frame we started a slow march, but as the years passed, quite a quick pace of "Amusing Ourselves" with obvious and not-so-obvious but insidious problems caused by this amusement. The insidious problems are WELL EXPLORED, and are to ourselves as well as to our political discourse.

From Publishers Weekly:

From the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity comes a sustained, withering and thought-provoking attack on television and what it is doing to us. Postman's theme is the decline of the printed word and the ascendancy of the "tube" with its tendency to present everything murder, mayhem, politics, weather as entertainment. The ultimate effect, as Postman sees it, is the shriveling of public discourse as TV degrades our conception of what constitutes news, political debate, art, even religious thought. Early chapters trace America's one-time love affair with the printed word, from colonial pamphlets to the publication of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. There's a biting analysis of TV commercials as a form of "instant therapy" based on the assumption that human problems are easily solvable. Postman goes further than other critics in demonstrating that television represents a hostile attack on literate culture.

To get a copy of this book to read, note that it is actually out of print! Acton does not have its own copies, but can get one from a member library. Or... just pop me an e-mail via the web site and let me know you'd like to read my copy.