It was a spectacle. No, I- I mean a miracle

The other week, while skimming the $1 bin at Borders, I ran across a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Between piles of corny love poetry gift books and the autobiographies of athletes, it was by far the most promising thing I'd seen there. It had a snazzy cover (which despite the cliche is often not a negligible factor in my book purchases) and from the synopsis it seemed like it might turn out to be a work of hysterical anti-establishment fanaticism ("We're becoming so saturated with media that our minds are lumpy gray pawns of The Organization!"), so I bought it.

As it turns out, what I bought was a reprint of the original Amusing, which was published in the mid-80s, a book about how excessive television viewing will affect American minds and lives. In 2002, Postman's son took the initiative to revamp and re-release the book. In his forward explaining his decision to resurrect his dad's book, Junior comments that even though the content centers on TV (which, compared to the internet and iPhones, seems like a positively antiquated topic of concern), the themes of Pop's book are still applicable. What's more, a lot of what Dad, in the midst of ReaganDays, apocalyptically predicted for the imminent future when it came to society and its systematic, oblivious descent into media-controlled sheephood has, as a matter of fact, come true. Postman Jr. claims that much of the stuff that Postman wrote, which got laughed at in the 80s, regularly gets familiarized nods now in the classrooms where it's discussed.

Also, incidentally, Junior writes that the new audience most likely to appreciate the reprinting of Amusing is analytically-minded college students. (This comment made me feel like I was clandestinely fated to buy Amusing and also like I'm the most predictable person on earth.) He thinks that we college folk are in a tentative middle ground, having grown up in this postmodern culture and with the developing technology, but we're close enough to the good ol' days of radio and snail mail to still be skeptical about things. We might, he ominously predicts, be the last generation capable of such criticism.

Now, I'm sort of used to the whole idea of media saturation, postmodern culture, and the inevitable spiraling of society into destructuralized meaninglessness. It isn't new. As a concept I think it's fascinating (in a Twilight Zone kind of way), and if I can get away with it, it's what I'll study in grad school and beyond. A lot of what I like about it is that it's still predictive; total postmodernization hasn't happened yet. Books like Postman's are fun because we can see what came true and, perhaps more significantly, what didn't. Even if we think we're 67% on our way to being mindless consumers of Buy n Large, the fact that there's a portion of the population chewing their fingernails off over it means that the process isn't complete. And honestly, it likely never will be complete. Writers at the turn of the 20th century thought the world was going to corporate hell, too. And that blew over. Sort of.

Basically, the reason that the study of postmodern culture is cool and slightly eerie (and not the other way around) is that I don't actually, deep down in my over-commercialized heart, believe that I'm going to wind up 400 lbs on the Axiom. 250 lbs on the subway, maybe.

Despite this, Postman's book freaks me out a little. He isn't necessarily worried that we'll spend 100% of our time sitting or watching TV, and he knows that we're too smart to be completely brainwashed by a totalitarian regime. His point is, the media doesn't have to demand all our time to do its viral work. The real worry is the erosion of our ability to make choices and judgments. With enough media saturation, we'll become unable to judge fact from fiction, humor from seriousness, fabrication from reality. And once we've reached that point, will it really matter who's in control?

And when this doesn't seem likely or worrisome, I like to try to figure out whether The Daily Show or ABC gives me more trustworthy news.