About thirty years ago in 1985, Neil Postman’s novel, Amusing Ourselves to Death, was published. At the time, the television was all the rage. Being a relatively new form of media, not many people stopped to think of the negative side effects of television, until Postman released his findings. His novel repeats the words “the medium is the message”, which means that the way that we receive messages is going to change the overall meaning of the message. This applied directly to television, as entertainment was the way we received our information. Eventually, we began to prefer receiving our messages through entertainment, nearly cutting off many other mediums. His findings still apply to the more advanced technology we have today, such as the …show more content…
This post-WWI novel tells the tale of a dystopian future where society is structured around everyone being happy. The story includes three main characters that do not conform to society’s standards and want more than a life of continuous, senseless bliss that is caused by taking soma, essentially a “happy pill”. Other lengths are taken in society as well such as eliminating monogamy and childbirth, because they either cause unhappiness or pain. Postman compares this addiction to happiness to the addiction to entertainment. He makes the point of if anything is not posed to society as a form of entertainment, then it is viewed as not as truthful, much like those in Huxley’s novel that if monogamy sometimes leads to unhappiness, then it does not have a place in their world. The most important aspect to bring from Huxley’s novel, is that it does not have a happy ending. This “perfect” society turned out to be not so perfect after all, even causing one of the main characters to become so unhappy that he commits suicide. This relates to what Postman is trying to prove, that if we too become obsessed with entertainment that as a society we will become unhappy. This is where the phrase “amusing ourselves to death” comes from …show more content…
An actual television is nearly a thing of the past. We have moved into the Information Age. The internet and digital media control our world, without many of us realizing it. With ease of access to endless amounts of information with just the touch of a fingertip, it’s hard to see a downside of this technology. However, author Sherry Turkle has no problem telling society the negative side effects of the internet in her novel, Alone Together. Turkle too started out like most of society, seeing the internet as a great new invention that could cut down the boundaries of race and stereotypes. From her 1995 novel, Life on the Screen, Turkle says that the internet will be a great place for everyone to come together and find a sense of self. She even says that “people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real,” but perhaps she didn’t realize how comfortable people were becoming (Turkle 23).
However, in 2012, Alone Together was published, and it offered an alternative view about the overuse of the internet and digital media. As the title alludes to, Turkle heeds a warning to reduce how much we use the internet to connect with one another, because it’s leading to emotional displacement onto technology rather than other humans. Turkle even admits that technology makes it easier to express emotions (Turkle 154). Although, Turkle over exaggerates in some points in the novel, such as every child had this one toy, her point is clear.