Are we amusing ourselves to death?

You might have heard the phrase “The medium is the message”, coined by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan. It refers to the fact that how we consume information is important for how it shapes our understanding of it, and also what happens to our minds when consuming it. For example, we might read a 400-page book about the French Revolution or watch a documentary containing the same content. In this case, the content of the message we receive is the same, but the character of the message is wildly different. So, which one is better? Let’s look at what the American author Neil Postman said about the differences.

Amusing ourselves to death

Reading cultivates something that Postman in his book “Amusing ourselves to death” (1985) calls the “typographic mind”. The typographic mind is a mind that is used to focus, due to long periods of sustained attention. Postman argues that the typographic mind is also rational due to a text’s linear and orderly structure, and how it forces its reader to grapple with and understand it. The consumption of moving images, such as television, cultivates another kind of mind. It has been called the “televisual mind”. Postman says this type of mind needs plain language, as it can’t be bothered with, or perhaps can’t understand, more complex reasoning. Postman brings up an example of a debate from August 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, who were both running for the Illinois senate seat at the time. First Douglas spoke for an hour, and then Lincoln replied for an hour and a half. It should also be noted that this was one of the shortest of their debates… And still, the audience remained engaged in the debate, attentively listening. Compare this to the political debates of today. Perhaps it is best summed up by Postman as he writes:

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

And also:

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

Remember that this book was published in 1985. Just imagine what Postman would have said about today’s political and cultural climate. Today we probably can’t even pride ourselves on having a televisual mind, but rather a TikTok mind with a 4-second attention span and less than minimal critical thinking and reasoning abilities. So why do we succumb to this? Perhaps Postman had the answer to this as well, as he wrote:

“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”

With modern technology, especially smartphones, we are no longer required to do anything actively. We just consume. And consume. And consume… And we certainly don’t have to waste any precious brainpower to think about what we’re consuming.

The way forward

So what is the way out of this downward spiral of our minds? Is there a way we claw our way back to a typographic mind? What seems clear is that by reading more quality books in 2025, we can build our attention span back up again, grow our abilities to think critically, and in the process also feel better. It feels good to focus, to be in the zone!

Some tools and websites that might help you get into the reading mode this year:

15 Pages

This is a tool I built last year that helps me track my reading and also save and share some of my favorite quotes: 15pages.com

Book recommendations

Some of my favorite books, both fiction and non-fiction: viktorlovgren.com/books

E-reader or physical book?

Speaking about the medium… Should you read physical books, or is there a way to be digital, while still getting the benefits of reading? More here: viktorlovgren.com/blog/e-reader-vs-physical-books