Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death

With the ever growing, rapid progression of technology, the world has experienced a surge of new, bright and gratifying information right at their fingertips. With this surge of accessible information comes a major pitfall, so wisely predicted by Neil Postman in the forward of Amusing Ourselves to Death. This downfall is the reality of the world’s useless information overload. While the increase of rapidly acquired knowledge may seem like a good idea on the surface, the danger lies in the gluttonous overconsumption of unimportant facts that continue to dull our senses and eliminate our true understanding of our surrounding environment.
Our view of the world is highly influenced by things and people who surround us. We make judgements based

Media, including television, cell phones, social media, ect., is spoon feeding the world conflict, hand delivering minor social issues that are not necessarily as hard pressing as we believe. While many scholars disagree (including Steven Johnson in Watching TV Makes you Smarter), what appears on the television screen of an average person is just the combination of pop culture items mixing together to re-affirm common beliefs. This is a worldwide occurrence, usually beginning in America and spreading throughout the world, a form of mass globalization that provides the world everything it needs without anyone lifting a finger. Joseph Joffe argues this as a form of soft power in The Perils of Soft Power, and it is slowly draining civilization of individuality. A fresh individuality is required to keep innovation and inventing, indulging the world further into an unending cycle of convenience, yet this indispensable cycle is simply inevitable. This proves Postman’s point written in Amusing Ourselves to Death, confirming in a sense that pop culture is detracting from our world’s individuality. It is as if the world is covered by the same shade of dull beige, blanketed in a safe cocoon of other’s opinions. The way to change this color? Break the cycle of spoon fed information, and begin one of self-discovery. Then, and hopefully it will be soon, we can move on to truly creating a representative “Pop