areportonamusingourselvestodeath娱乐至死英文读书报告

Introduction: In recent years, ” Amusing ourselves to death” seem s to turn to a given phrase, shouldering the task of catching the eyes of the republic as headlines in media. People use this word as a powerful weapon to attack the increasing tendency of entertainment in today’s culture, politics, religion, education, etc. Now I’ve finished reading Neil Boltzmann's Amusing Ourselves to Death and found that this is indeed a splendid and powerful book.

Key words: culture; press; TV sets; entertainment; alertness

I. A brief introduction of Amusing Ourselves to Death

There is a subtitle Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business following the title Amusing Ourselves to Death in the original book, the addition of which constitutes the complete title (Chinese version has removed the subtitle).

Boltzmann starts with Orwell’s and Huxley’s predictions, namely the two ways of the destruction of culture——whether culture will become a prison or a farce, and points out that it is the latter that will become a reality rather than the former. Then he puts forward his basic thought Media are Metaphor, which means that media is a kind of discourse structure, and it is the form decides the content in our real life, not the other way around. Then Boltzmann tells people that American was once a society where print could flow freely in each class and in every field with a great number of examples. In the environment where paper media pervade, people are rational, logical and more serious. But nowadays, American society is occupied by TV sets. The invention of television has the tendency of destroying our culture. With television being the electronic media, the spread content of our society is incoherence and lacking of context, so is simple, short, trivial and entertaining. So entertainment is more and more infiltrating into every corner of the American society, including politics, education, religion, etc, thus deconstructing the American public discourse. For all of this, as Boltzmann points out, it is OK with television and entertainment itself but the problem lies in that those so-called elites are trying to endow TV

with earnestness and loftiness because the essence of TV is entertainment. People come out of the "Interpretation age" and into the "Entertainment era". Junk information pours in our daily life at an unprecedented speed. Therefore, Boltzmann puts forward his solution - rely on school education at the end of his book.

II. Reflection on Amusing Ourselves to Death

Just as Plato put it, the form of conversation of human has a significant impact on the thought expressed. In many cases, a word’s credibility lies in the credibility of the tone it is said. The competition of thoughts (people’s understandings but the illusory truth) to a certain degree is also the competition of media. At the beginning of human society, it is the movement that conveys the information; before the invention of writing, oral communication is a very important index; when printing came into the world later, words are mostly reliable; but in a society of telegraph, television and network, in what way will people talk to each other?

Since the invention of the TV sets, there was a large-scale activity refusing the use of TV. And most ironically, the biggest medium propagating the activity is the TV itself. In other words, people opposed the use of TV sets via watching TV programs. This kind of propagation is so weak because it is clear that to whom the words tool belongs. It is necessary and valuable for the existence of entertainment, so is TV itself. But if the entertainment and TV have occupied the right of public discourse and the culture society, then we really should do something for our survival before suffering from the pain of becoming ”not know why I laugh and cease thinking”.

But, in the present, television and network have been widely accepted and held the right of public discourse to some extent. Obviously, this two kinds of media have the essence of entertainment. In that case, my personal wisdom can’t go beyond Boltzmann’s. Perhaps, we can only maintain our alertness in culture through strengthening school "media consciousness" education and

listening to Boltzmann’s "warning" to keep at the same time.

III. Conclusion

Nowadays, corruption in the Communist Party of China is a heated topic among all ranks of people. People criticize the communists even at the cost of their lives. Many students declare themselves to be” young cynic” not to obey regulations and make trouble anywhere as they please. But I don’t think it is wise.

Actually, we are living in an environment full of temptations. We are living in an entertaining world. It is people’s instinct to addict himself in feasting and revelry unconsciously. As you can see, some communists are lost in their pursuit of money and status; some teachers leave their real obligations of teaching and researching behind and are only crazy about reputation; to name just a few. This indicates that some people have forgotten their position in our society. They don’t know who they are. They are lost. It is of no use criticizing them or parading yourselves as being different. What we have to do is position ourselves correctly and do what we should do. Otherwise, we will only add to the complexity and disorder in our society.

As a student, our main duty is to study. So just remember who you are and what you should do——launching yourselves into studying. Forget about the unfairness and dark side of our society. Because while lost in the meditation of other roles in society and ceasing your task of studying, you will be one element of that unfairness and darkness.