Amusing Ourselves to Death has established itself as a key text in cultural and media studies. Television, Postman argues, has taken the place of the printed word at the center of our culture, and in doing so has trivialised the once serious and coherent discussion of all public affairs. Even our political and religious leaders today depend more on camera angles and showmanship than on reason and rhetoric.

Postman makes a convincing, often wittily argued, case that we are moving not towards George Orwell's vision of the future but towards Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in which people become addicted to technologies which take away their capacities to think: their critical faculties are destroyed and their sense of history is lost.