"Although the film was made years before a movie actor became President of the United States, Brooks was making a kind of prophecy about that "namely, that the producers of American culture will increasingly turn our history, politics, religion, commerce, and education into forms of entertainment, and that we will becomes as a result a trivial people, incapable of coping with complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, perhaps even reality
We will become, in a phrase, a people amused into stupidity."" (Mercury, 43).
Postman finishes up his essay talking about how television is the most used medium in America today. Politicians use television for their campaigns, one of our Presidents is a former actor, educational shows in which demands of entertainment overshadow education, and he states that, "Even our daily news, which for most Americans means television news, is packaged as a kind of show, featuring handsome news readers, exciting music, and dynamic film footage. Most especially, film footage. When there is no film footage, there is no story.""(Mercury, 46).
Postman's "Future Shlock- is a little outdated in the fact that he focuses on television as the primary form of technology that enables us to be entertained instead of engaging in intelligent public discourse. These days the Internet would take the crown.
According to Leo Reisberg, who wrote "10% of Students May Spend Too Much Time Online, Study Suggests-, "At least 10% of college students use the internet so much that it interferes with their grades, their health, and their social lives."" (Sequence for Academic Writing, 172).
Keith J. Anderson, a staff psychologist at Rensselaer's Counseling Center, says, "The students who were identified as dependent spent an average of 229 minutes a day using the Internet for nonacademic reasons, compared with 73 minutes a day for others."" Mr. Anderson also notes, "We've gone in the last five years from being Internet savvy to being so overly Internet connected that it starts to impact some aspects of our lives.
