In an interview on The Future of Advertising

Next book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Neil Postman took the work of Marshall McLuhan – who was putting out early theories on media – and built on them. However, Postman was far more observant and empirical about the trends occurring in the media landscape. The trends which he identifies in Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in the 1980s, have since all come true. For example, he predicted that if you make news entertaining, then it’s a short slippery slope until you start making entertainment the news and, as we have seen, he was absolutely right on about that. He was also right about the fact that, whilst we were all concerned about the book 1984, it was really Brave New World that was the true predictor of our fate.

But you work in exactly this field. How does Postman’s analysis affect how you think about your own work?

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a reminder that what we do doesn’t happen in a vacuum. What we do happens in a context: it sounds obvious, but it’s actually very easy to forget. Once, whilst I was working for a particular television network (that shall remain anonymous), somebody used the word pandering one day about the work we were doing. I suddenly realised that he was right, that’s exactly what I had been doing in the two years I’d been working with them – producing low-quality adverts which pandered to the audience. The book also has a message for advertisers post ‘the digital revolution’ – that the same fate awaits the new media. There are so many studies these days on the way that we process information we find on the internet, most of them showing how this reduces our attention span and our ability to process complex ideas. As the famous saying goes, ‘those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it’. Those working in advertising should read Amusing Ourselves to Death: knowing the past helps us to avoid the same pitfalls in the future, and to keep everything in perspective.