Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “What’s a book you wish were more popular?”
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985, but Postman’s analysis of how modern technology, especially television, trivializes information and supplants it with entertainment has never been more relevant than in the age of news via-facebook, news-via twitter, news-via-tiktok, etc. where reactions and emotional shares matter more than say, thoughtful substack analysis of events. I remember being blown away by Postman when I stumbled on him — completely by accident! back in ’07, ’08. He is the reason I didn’t buy a smartphone until 2018. I owe him a re-read.
And now, to WWW!
WHAT have you finished reading recently? I finished my big California Diaries re-read, as well as a history of St. Petersburg that had been my lunchtime reading at work for the last month or so. Review to follow today.
WHAT are you currently reading? Still working on Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder than it Needs to Be, and recently started Star Trek: Firewall by David Mack. There are a multitude of Kindle NF titles I’ve read like 10% of and then got distracted by.
WHAT are you reading next? I REALLY SHOULD FINISH THE VOLCANO BOOKS. BOTH OF THEM. (Mary Beard’s Fires of Vesuvius, on Pompeii, and Mountains of Fire: The Menace, Meaning, and Magic of Volcanos by Clive Oppenheimer.
Reading Freely 
The book sounds interesting, Stephen. I’ll have to give it a read! Thanks! ☺️
Postman is something else!
You just have to control the technology and have the self-discipline to do so on a personal level. Sadly, not many people seem capable of that. Well, that’s not true. They ARE capable, they just choose not to be.
Honestly, these days that seems like controlling cigarettes! There are some platforms I avoid completely because of the way they can play the brain — like Tiktok.
That’s what I mean about control. Avoiding something completely is one form. My wife n I only use our phones to call n text. No data plan. So we can go on wifi and use the internet, and do, but I can’t just randomly start up Chrome and surf the net. And I don’t add apps to our phones either.
Postman has been one of my favorite authors for decades. In addition to this book I would recommend Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk and What to Do About It.
I didn’t realize that was a problem back in the 1980s. I thought it was much more recent than that.
Lydia
I haven’t read Amusing Ourselves to Death, but I bet I would find it to be a good read.
Postman is one of my favorite NF authors. Very impactful.
I remember liking both the Postman books, though it’s been a few years. Vance Packard, too, in the 1960s. Television always was the inane opiate of the masses, and being a couch potato was hazardous to the health of people who were able to be couch potatoes in the 1950s.
(I take the anti-TV message seriously enough that although I watch TV at friends’ houses or in hotels, there is not and has never been a set in my home. And I once rented a furnished room that came with a TV set for six months before trying to turn the set on.)
Pris cilla King
I keep meaning to read the Packard books, especially The Waste Makers.