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AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH†
Abstract
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
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“Through this process of 'mediatization' (Hjarvard, 2008), the operational logic of the dominant form of media gradually comes to define the broader cultural logic of its era (McLuhan, 1994; Postman, 1985).”
From Social Media Imaginaries and the City: How the Attention Economy Is Reshaping Urban Built Environments (2025) · cites this paper as Postman, 1985
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Metadata
- Authors
- Postman, N.
- Affiliations
- Neil Postman is Editor of Et cetera.
- Corresponding author
- Postman, Neil
- Venue
- ETC: A Review of General Semantics
- Publisher
- Institute of General Semantics
- Published
- 1985
- Volume
- 42
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 13-18
- ISSN
- 0014-164X (ISSN-L)
- 2168-9245
- OpenAlex
- W1586665605
- Cited by
- 1,117
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 26 · 2021: 29 · 2020: 72 · 2019: 56 · 2018: 46 · 2017: 33 · 2016: 25 · 2015: 33 · 2014: 46 · 2013: 28 · 2012: 33
- FWCI
- 71.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ETC.: A Review of General Semantics (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
- Social Sciences › Communication › Cultural Studies and Postmodernism
- Social Sciences › Communication › Media, Communication, and Education
- Keywords
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, loss of autonomy, loss of history
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