Hello everyone!

I’ve seen a surprising number of tweets, articles, and podcasts about this book:

​AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH by Neil Postman

It talks about how the advent of television and visual media has significantly changed the way we interpret the world’s information especially when it comes to the issues that matter to us most; transitioning from a literate written form to an entertaining visual medium.

The key here is entertainment - it provides sensory gratification instead of critical evaluation, superficial discourse over deep public conversations.

It provides a cultural sense of how we perceive not just information but also ourselves and others. The big picture from this book is this:

“The medium is the metaphor.”

The medium is a perspective of the information and shapes our ideas. The medium IS the idea. As our attention span is frighteningly reducing, short-form content is becoming a saviour in consuming information with little time and energy. But from this concept, a short-form version is perceived differently from long-form.

Perspective is the essence of how we see life and the issues that matter to us.

🧠 Neuroscience

The neuroscience of social media is extremely complex and not easy to find the differences in cognition in relation to the cultural shift from deep to shallow discourse with visual entertaining media. But one area to keep in mind is the prefrontal cortex, which is heavily involved in perspective deciphering, also known as theory of mind, where we are figuring out the perspectives and motivations of the person we are interpreting. It’s taking in everything the visual cortex observes when looking at social media videos:

- Person

- Colours

- Speech

- Communication cues

- Even time and space!

During my research, studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex is activated when an image is shown, but one review stresses its role in pattern processing. This is considered a higher-order cognitive function, finding connections with stimuli it is exposed to.

In the context of Amusing Ourselves, the prefrontal cortex is involved in both reading and viewing comprehension. But in a social sense for the collective good, Postman stresses the need for deeper discourse through critical thinking and context deciphering.

So the next time you may see a news story or a gaslighting video, could there be something even deeper than this?

Thanks for reading!

Mark x