Chapter 39 11/12

In this chapter, Neil Postman discusses how dangerous television has become, especially in American society where the average person watches 4 hours of television every day. He believes that because of television, we have lost our sense of strangeness of the world. He also mentions the world epistemology, which is the role television plays in making people see the world in the way the television presents it. Television was created to entertain us and Postman believes that it is entertaining us to death as it transforms our society. Later in his essay, postman compares the role of shopping and television. Thanks to television, we as humans need to be entertained and amused at all times. We view a great amount of commercials on TV that inform and instruct us on what products or services to buy, then after being amused and sold on a particular view, we go out and shop for these products. Shopping has become a form of entertainment as well. I feel that both TV and shopping have become a type of drug that brings out a certain emotion in people that they can't get enough of. Many social scientists have warned people about the ever-looming danger that they felt television would someday create, however it has not stopped the amount of television we watch as a society.