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In his essay The Age of Show Business, Neil Postman demonstrates many arguments about how television has perverted society’s standards, and had taken the realm of entertainment too far. All of its meaningful content, he asserts, is perverted into mere trashy entertainment. However, the argument that Postman conveys to his readers is littered quite with fallacies, and seemed to be one giant circular argument concerning the consequences of television.
Most of Postman’s writing on the topic seemed either blatantly obvious, or like the opinion of an old conservative who doesn’t condone the fact that TV is entertaining. After giving a historical background of the existence of television and its origins, Postman begins to form his primary thesis: that television, unlike the printing press that came before it, is permanently predisposed towards media as entertainment and therefore cannot be used properly as a tool through which serious news and information can be broadcasted.
The article is an attack against television as a medium, which, he says is overflowing with destructive content. He argues that television plays such significance in the lives of Americans that their ability to take the world seriously has been completely lost. Postman believes by the assimilation of television into the culture of the masses, the world has become a product of its false reality. But the effect he describes is not proven or logical, and his theories are really not supported by any sort of evidence.
Postman believes that modern culture forces everything that was held as important before the reign of television into something people should see as entertaining and not serious world events and ideas. In another argument, Postman tries explain how the information and news and media created by the printing press so long ago in American history was so much more ‘coherent, serious and rational’ then that as portrayed on television today. These are the sort of...