Rhetorical Devices of Amusing Ourselves to Death

I wasn’t sure what I was going to read about when I started Amusing Ourselves to Death, and truthfully, I didn’t know until the fourth or fifth chapter. That’s when Neil Postman really began describing what entertainment has become in our culture. He wrote this book in a very well-organized manner, going from the oral to the written to the television/radio periods in time. Our culture has developed so much over the years, especially with the technology we depend on. Even though Postman wrote this book in 1985, his argument is still very valid. By the use of rhetorical devices, Postman makes his argument clearer, and even more reasonable.

First of all, logos was widely used in the form of quotes and examples. Logos is the Greek term which means, “The appeal to reason.” Postman was trying to reason with the reader the entire time to get them to see what television has and will become. Even though Postman wrote this book to persuade the reader to agree with him, he reasoned with his readers for the most part. This is probably because he didn’t want to come off as pushy, but gentle. Ethos focuses on persuasive appeal, but Postman did it in a very subtle way. In writing this book, Postman refrained from using pathos, which refers to the fact that he excluded most of the emotion from his words. This made his argument more valid because it means that he used facts and didn’t try to guilt the reader or cause immense fear to what has or might happen to society.

Usually writers use schemes to add emphasis on a specific issue by building up emotion inside the writer, but the way Postman used these rhetorical devices made it so that nearly no emotion was included, only further examples or explanations. I read an example of anaphora on page 29: Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration. Typography created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Typography made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into mere superstition… Another rhetorical device I found was antimetabole (page 75), which is the repeating of words in reverse grammatical order in successive clauses. A different device used was alliteration where the initial or middle consonants in two or more successive words are repeated (page 54: These men were spectacularly successful preachers, whose appeal reached regions of consciousness far beyond where reason rules.). On many occasions, Postman used asyndeton which is where you pile up words without using conjunctions and only inserting commas.

In conclusion, Postman’s predictions of our society seem very accurate, and for the most part, I agree. I realized that yes, we do depend too much on television and entertainment now and it will only get worse in the future. Now I’m finding that I ask myself, “Do I really have to watch TV?” and instead, pick up a book or go outside.