Do you remember when television was the technology we were warned about? When parents fretted over too many hours glued to the screen after school, teachers rolled in a TV on a metal cart like contraband, and cultural critics cautioned that the glowing box in our living rooms might rot our brains. Television was the villain of its age, and just like social media today, it existed as a passive, mind-numbing force that threatened attention spans and civic life. Neil Postman took that fear seriously, and in 1985 he declared that we Americans are Amusing Ourselves to Death.
What feels almost quaint now is not Postman’s alarm, but his target. Television was merely the prototype for the power that cellphones and tablets have over the population. The danger was never the screen itself, but what happens when a society allows its dominant media to define how truth is presented, how politics is understood, and how meaning is measured. Postman was not arguing against technology; he was warning that every medium carries a philosophy, and that some philosophies are incompatible with serious thought.
“Orwell feared those who would ban books,” Postman wrote. “Huxley feared that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” George Orwell, the author of 1984, imagined a tyrannical government suppressing the flow of truth and free speech through pain. Aldous Huxley, who wrote the book Brave New World, imagined tyranny through pleasure. The modern digital ecosystem has reignited the debate as to whether the United States will devolve into a vision of Orwell or Huxley. We are not overtly constrained by the heavy hand of federal overlords. Instead, atomized citizens entertain themselves into irrelevance.
This is how we arrived at what Postman called “peek-a-boo” news — information without continuity or consequence. Stories surface briefly, disappear, and are replaced before they can demand action or reflection. A war, a scandal, a meme, and a sponsored post flash before your eyes quicker than meaningful comprehension. “We are flooded with information,” Postman warned, “but starved for knowledge.” The algorithm does not ask whether something is true or important, only whether it’s clickable.
Clicks equal revenue for advertisers and the big tech companies, so in a sense, we are operating both under the imagined societies of Huxley and Orwell. Follow the money, the public-private partnerships, and you will find yourself entwined in a web of commercial interests that likely don’t bend to your benefit. But that doesn’t matter, because you’re more concerned with being a participant in the modern world than untangling something you don’t understand.
This is the subtle genius of the digital ecosystem. Unlike Orwell’s nightmare, no one is forced to comply. Unlike Huxley’s soma, no chemical pacifier is required. We volunteer our attention, outsource our thinking, and mistake constant stimulation for participation. The algorithm flatters us by reflecting our beliefs back at us, sharpening tribal lines while dulling our capacity for doubt. Disagreement becomes hostility, nuance becomes weakness, and silence is interpreted as guilt. In a media ecosystem optimized for affirmation, the pursuit of truth becomes socially costly.
Consider that America’s obsession with politics is a symptom of societal sickness. A healthy society does not experience politics as a 24-hour performance that flings in your face like fragments of debris from a relentless storm. Postman warned that when politics becomes entertainment, it ceases to function as a serious mechanism for self-government. Average citizens do not deliberate; we root for our team instead of trying to persuade others of our perspective.
Gen Z is often blamed for this lack of seriousness, but that accusation misses the point. Young people are not the authors of this condition; they are its most complete expression. They grow up in an environment where everything is content, and everyone is a brand. The self becomes something to curate, not something to cultivate.
A culture cannot think itself out of a medium it doesn’t understand. Postman believed that schools were one of the last places capable of resisting technological dominance. Instead, we surrendered them. Older Gen Z students may remember the elementary school “computer lab” as a separate class. Technology was something you learned about. Today, it is something you breathe.
Media and technology are now embedded into education. It is omnipresent, largely unexamined, and composed of substances few fully understand. Teachers tell children that screens, digital platforms, gamified lessons, and algorithmic feedback are “simply how the world works.” But as Postman warned, “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.” America did not add media to learning — it transformed learning itself.
The gamification of serious subjects has consequences. When everything is designed to be engaging, nothing is allowed to be different. When learning must always entertain, boredom becomes an emergency rather than a teacher or an opportunity to think. America produces students fluent in interfaces but impatient with complexity. Students are comfortable with expression but unfamiliar with thought, only to grow up into adults who vote based on the media’s emotional current rather than opinions rooted in reason and a sense of self.
The solution is not to abolish technology, but to separate it from immersion. Technology and media should be taught as subjects, not atmospheres — like history or science. Students would study how digital algorithms shape perception, how data is harvested and sold, how platforms incentivize behavior, and how media forms privilege to certain kinds of truth while excluding others. They would learn when not to use technology, just as they learn when not to use chemicals or machinery. America’s teachers must inform students that they have a choice between using technology and being used by it. The highest civic skill in the digital age is not coding or content creation, but the ability to look away.
But schools cannot teach what families refuse to practice. A child cannot learn to “look away” from technology if every idle moment is filled for them. Parental discomfort with bored or emotionally needy children often drives the very dependency educators are called to undo. For parents, screens satiate their desire for a moment of peace from the never-ending attention demanded by their kids. They enter adolescence burdened with academic pressure, social anxiety, and bodies changing faster than their sense of self can keep up. These are not conditions children are equipped to manage alone.
Today, many children live in dual-income households; both mom and dad are often at work. Other parents are divorced, but the outcome is the same: a discomforted, confused, and overwhelmingly stressed-out child left to their own devices. So, the screen offers something irresistibly appealing: escape without consequence. Online, identity is malleable. Pain can be muted, attention can be curated, and the self can be endlessly reinvented across usernames, platforms, and digital avatars.
For many young people, the digital world becomes a retreat from a reality that feels demanding, judgmental, or uncontrollable. It is a space where they can experiment with identity, language, and community in ways that feel safer than the physical world because the rules are different. But what begins as exploration does not always remain contained. Behaviors, identities, and emotional patterns reinforced online inevitably spill into real life — into classrooms, families, and institutions unprepared to distinguish between development, distress, and durable belief.
Postman was right that media shapes consciousness, but he was wrong to imply that institutions alone could save us from ourselves. No school curriculum can substitute for a parent willing to say no, to tolerate boredom, and to endure a child’s frustration without offshoring guardianship of that child to a screen.
Institutions and Big Tech deserve criticism, but they cannot undo what families have fallen away from doing themselves. You cannot outsource formation and then demand repair. Postman warned that we would amuse ourselves into decline, but the deeper failure is that we stopped believing it was our responsibility to raise the next generation at all. This is not achieved by laughing at news stories about how bizarre Gen Z or Gen Alpha is behaving. It should be a matter of reflection, understanding how the generations that preceded made decisions that enabled the behavior of America’s future constituents.
If we want to be a country capable of attention, judgment, and self-command, the work does not begin with schools, platforms, or policy. It begins at home with parents willing to be present, to be uncomfortable, and to raise their own children.
