If doing that didn't hurt them hijjus, then we're further gone than even I thought. Oh, the irony.
Amusing Ourselves to Death crystallized a lot of thoughts for me when I read it in 1987. If you take it simply as a warning against television indulgence, you miss the point. He was concerned about the way in which mass media of every sort warp the stories that they tell us, by their very nature.
Back in the years between the printing press and the telegraph, news, views, and commentary wouldn't be printed and circulated unless it was found to be of some lasting importance. There was a natural delay between the event and the report of the event, which tended to shake out the baloney and false first impressions.
This country shows the effect of this delay in that general elections (such as for President and Congress) are held in November but the Congress does not convene for two months afterward ( and the President originally did not take office until March! ) That left time for elections to be counted, certified, and published without any mass media other than a public bulletin board or the local news sheet.
All that changed with the coming of the telegraph, which cut the time from event to print, consequently, the news became at once more voluminous and less "dense", or, shall we say, "important". I seem to remember Postman quoted Thoreau to the effect of dissing the transatlantic cable project, in that once the cable is laid and the news starts coming through, America would be treated to momentous revelations such as that "Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough".
After the telegraph came the telephone, then radio, then TV. With each one, the time-to-market of news became less, and the news became progressively more immediate--but at the same time, it became more voluminous--and more unimportant. The really important, consequential events are buried in a cacophonous sea of irrelevancies (such as pronunciamentos from the Center for Science in the Public Interest.) Besides, we constantly see stories reported with a breathless immediacy, only to find out several days later (if at all!) that the report was mostly wrong.
So, yes, Postman didn't have much good to say of TV, but his indictment of the media reaches much further back. He traced the roots of the stupefying influence of mass media two hundred years back.
I wonder now, where does FR fall in all this? After all, it is quite "immediate", but it doesn't seem to have the mind-numbing effect of TV. Seems to me that "immediacy" is not the problem. It's a matter of how many people have vetted the information that is published. Too many cooks spoil the broth, but when it's a narrative of important current events in the pot, the more hands that stir it the better. Back when broadsides and pamphlets had to be hand typeset and distributed, people took time to digest and certify what they were writing. Others read the pamphlets and critiqued them, published pamphlets of their own, etc. All this took time, but, before electronic communications, folks had time.
Enter the tele(whatever) and the very speed of the medium blocks the possibility of commentary by any but the few who are attached to the wire. Everybody else is "on the outside, looking in." Understandably, those who controlled the transmission media eventually realized the power these conferred (principally that of insulation from independent critique) and so arose the modern establishment press, with its insufferable totalitarian bias.
Today, with the internet, we little people can now hook into the wire ourselves, and offer commentary on the news served up as fast as the news itself. In a way, sites such as FR have partially restored the checks and balances once provided by the community in the days of the old printing press. Anybody can set up a blog, link to anything that interests him, and comment on it all day long. The people go where they find the good stuff, and stay away from the bad, all on their own. This is the same process that makes a good book into a "classic", telescoped into the time scale of the daily news.
Books still operate on the scale of centuries, so it's too soon to tell if Postman has scored a "classic", but it's a good read for all that.
Requiescat in pace.