areportonamusingourselvestodeath娱乐至死英文读书报告.doc

Introduction: In recent years, ” Amusing ourselves to death” seems 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 Boltzmanns 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棗whether eculture 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 Bo