Amusing Ourselves to Death - Chapter 7

 Chapter 7 - "Now...This"

1. What is verisimilitude?

2. What is the ad hominem argument?

3. What is introspection?

4. Who is George Orwell?

5. Who is Aldous Huxley and how did he predict that people would begin to be amused into indifference?

REACTION:

    Postman begins chapter 7 discussing how we direct our attention to one story and it is very serious or dramatic and then it immediately changes to something completely different. Implementing the  "Now...This" action. He talks about how music is always played in the background of movies, news, stories, commercials, any content really. Apparently it is soothing and makes the visual more appealing because the music is subconsciously comforting. 
    The reason film and television is so effective is because it proves itself. When humans see things for themselves, it holds immediate truth. When heard or told by someone or something we have a harder time believing it. 
    It also surprises me how we don't think badly about television when it informs us of terrible news and then is immediately interrupted by a irrelevant commercial. If people would do that in conversation or even in a movie, we usually skip through them or get annoyed. But television is live and controlled and we are almost hypnotized by it. Until they made the DVR but that is a little advanced for this book. 
Television turned into a way of altering information that they provide people. He uses the example of disinformation which means information with the intent to mislead. They are completely aware that they are feeding us misleading information, but they see nothing wrong with doing it. That is definitely not okay. When they create news in a form of entertainment, it messes with our head because normally when you have something bad happened to you, you are sad about it. The news isn't there to make you sad, its there to inform you. For what? It is usually situations that happen so far away from your home location and has literally no affect on you whatsoever. Postman addresses a valid question of "what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?" It sounds like a plague to me. 
      Hypocrisy also is becoming a huge problem, because we are educated by schools and by parents, if our parents at all, we learn one thing but at the same time are learning from schools and the media the complete opposite. People who don't have parents, only learn from the media and it is totally conforming our society. 
     Television is also like a media parent. It's content is so hypnotizing and popular and has such high success rates, other forms of media are trying to incorporate means that television does to be just as successful.