Tag Archives: Intelligent Thought

The Message Is the Medium

An excerpt from The Gospel Coalition:

The medium is the message. This is the idea Neil Postman popularized 25 years ago when he dropped his literary bombshell, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Obviously we Americans could do with less entertainment, whether it’s Netflix, FarmVille, or our insatiable appetite for sports. But Postman wasn’t critiquing entertainment per se; he was critiquing our attempts to deal with serious matters through it. His thesis: We live in an age not of exposition but of entertainment, making thoughtful interaction essentially impossible, since light media can’t support serious ideas.

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