Bemusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Social Media

• Authors: William Merrin

Abstracts

EN

In 1985, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, a McLuhan-inspired critique of the transformation of public discourse from 19th-century print culture, with its depth of reading, thought and debate, to the contemporary era of television ‘show business’. Developments since then, most notably the digital revolution, allow us to update Postman’s thesis, to explore the digital age that succeeds the electric broadcast era and its contemporary transformation of culture and politics. This paper argues that digital personalisation has exploded the mass-media world, bursting its mainstream bubble into a foam of individual life-worlds, empowering everyone as the producer of their own realities. Arguing that the key thinker of this era is Philip K. Dick (with his exploration of fictive, split, and personal realities), the paper explores the cultural impact of this new post-truth era of ‘media’ realities and the ‘bemusement’ it produces.

Keywords

EN

Postman; McLuhan; Baudrillard; reality; hyporeality; social-media; Dick

• Publisher: AGH University of Science and Technology
• Journal: Studia Humanistyczne AGH
• Year: 2022
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 17-29

Dates

published

2022

Contributors

author

William Merrin

• Swansea University, United Kingdom

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Identifiers

DOI

10.7494/human.2022.21.2.17

Biblioteka Nauki

2154943