Countless new reels every day, a constantly expanding and recurring Netflix catalog, broadcasted political discussions as a broadcast spectacle. It seems we're being swamped by a constant stream of entertainment. It makes you wonder: Perhaps we have reached the point at which we perceive reality through a screen, where it serves as our sixth sense.
This is the state of affairs described by Neil Postman as early as 1985 in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death feared. A society that does not practice totalitarian suppression of thought in accordance with George Orwell, but, according to Aldous Huxley, ensnares the media, which restrict its intellectual independence. Where technology degenerates into ideology without us realizing it and controlling us as far as possible (Postman 1986:157).
That doesn't sound fundamentally implausible; we are unequivocally Defined by our media, you consider how actively they accompany our everyday lives... but isn't it all a bit black painting? Apart from the fact that Postman discussed a television company in particular, where we are now already X steps ahead, towards the Internet and now generative AI. How current is the idea?
There was a heated discussion on threads recently (unfortunately we can't find the exact post anymore, sorry) as to what Germany's most important invention was. There were many answers, from MP3 format to... bratwurst (yes, really), but perhaps the most important achievement was missing: modern letterpress printing. In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg launched what was arguably the first major media revolution in the Western world. It took many years until the printing process was perfected and literature and reading skills became generally available, but this marks the birth of what Neil Postman called “Typographic Mind” would characterize (cf. Postman 1986:44).
With the book, an important medium was created and the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan finally claimed: “The medium is the message.” What is meant is that the way we understand content is linked to About what these are communicated. In other words, we should look at the medium rather than at the message. Every new communication technology — whether it's a book, television, ChatGPT, etc. — transforms our perception.
“When a technology, whether from within or without, is introduced into a culture and when it gives one or the other of our senses a new face or a new boost, then the mutual relationship of all our senses is shifted.” (McLuhan 2011:31)
In other words, think back to a society in which communication took place orally for the longest time. Where the spoken word was our primary object of information, for example in the ancient forum. Information would probably have to be brief and concise in order to pass it on reliably; there is wisdom in proverbs and discourse guarantees new public knowledge. Then comes the pressure: You have to imagine major social change during such transitions, and the basic principles of the way we cultivate knowledge are shaken. So let us enter this future, where the spoken word is replaced by the written word. What does reading do to us? Postman states clearly:
“From Erasmus in the Sixteenth Century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the Twentieth, Almost Every Scholar Who Has Grappled with the Question of What Reading Does to One's Habits of Mind Has Concluded That Encourages the Process Rationality; That the Sequential, Propositional Character of the Written Word Fosters What Walter Ong Calls the “Analytic Management of Knowledge.” (Postman 1986:51)
Reading — in contrast to theatre, television, social media and the like — is an active process and requires thinking along, visualizing, and understanding arguments. In contrast to oral information, it is also a solitary process. If we don't understand a sentence, let's just read it again — but who rewinds in the movie, hasn't you understood a plot point? Nothing about this is particularly surprising. On the one hand, we have been advertising for years that reading is great for education and concentration, but on the other hand, it has also been taught since school days. At the same time, you mourn the lost art of attention span — and that's actually what it's about. Postman first presents what a typographic society looked like and what happened after the television.
It's hard to imagine where short snippets on social media are enough for many instead of following the long discourses, but it wasn't unusual at all for the typographic society.
For this, Postman resorts to the famous election campaign between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas on August 21, 1858 in Illinois (Postman 1986:44). The two candidates found themselves on a podium, debated before the masses and the time agreed upon for this purpose: Douglas would need one hour to present his plea that Lincoln would have a response time of one and a half hours, which Douglas could respond to for a further 30 minutes. Quite a long time? Not at all! In 1854, Douglas spoke for a full three hours and Lincoln convinced the audience to go home for dinner before moving on.
Postman argues that such debates could only take place because, in the nature of things, the typographical mind is better focused on dedicating itself to a cause for a long period of time. Concentrated work.
In postmodern life, we have neither the time nor the ability to pay attention to six hours of political discussion, and this is also reflected in the medium and message. Postman compares the presidential debate broadcast on television in 1984: five minutes per question including five minutes for the answer, commercial breaks in between, a simplification of political syntax (Postman 1986:97). That sounds more familiar to us already. Postman reveals: Nowadays, we're simplifying. The television was followed by the natural transformation into a showbiz society, where information retention and political education simultaneously represent spectacle and entertainment. The loss is far more serious than the withdrawal of authentic information; rather than that, we lose the basics of being more authentic Informedness — and this opens up a form of society in which information and ignorance can be equated, where anti-intellectualism could flourish (Postman 1986:107 f.). Successful examples include television debates with Trump, where he can spread any bullsh*t, provided that it convinces personal intuition and conviction. As I said: Not an Orwell Big Brother, but technology that anesthetizes — and we accept it (Postman 1986:111).
Entertainment, according to Postman, would become the natural representation of all perception and experience in a screen-driven world (Postman 1986:87). Here we see the world through a screen. In the age of Inifinite Scrollings a shockingly accurate presentation of content and consumption. We learn about this in many places about the world today, watch something extraordinary, pull out the cell phone instead of enjoying it/helping/...
The accusation that social media is a sensuous drug used by the masses has long been hotly and critically discussed (but also somewhat chewed off). We know that social media can cause a variety of damage — both private and public — and there are already lively countermovements to divert attention with analog (re) tools. Whether in the form of handwritten notes, record players or books. Does that immunize against the temptations of entertainment? It's unlikely. In short: We address the problem in many corners, but we can't really correct it either, especially since all these technologies also have their active advantages and are hard to imagine our (working) life without. We too fall for the “spectacle”:
“The Spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is meditated by images.” (1992:12)
In the sense of “the medium is the message,” this means that we communicate across society not typographically, but increasingly via visual media and thus shape our perception and collection of information. We send each other reels and memes, emojis, and selfies. Experienced experience is represented. Our reality is becoming technological and technology is moving away from reality (Debord 1992:22). In everyday life, in 2010, it was the couple who went to slideshow invited. “Here Schatzi and I are at the booth, there Schatzi is just bathing (on the beach), here Schatzi (on the beach) found a mussel. ” In 2025, these are eternally similar reels on TikTok, Insta and Co. No matter what: There is nothing real about this, just an image — and that's where the cognitive dissonance starts somehow. See something and stop by at the same time.
It would probably look a bit different in oral and typographic societies. The description of impressions: the pleasant scent of fresh ciabatta flowing through the back alleys, the Italian gravel under the Birkenstocks — the taste of Italian seawater and the direct connection to why noodles may be so excessively salted during cooking. This appeals to a more human sensibility, because travel is meant to be experienced — in all its impressions. However, that is missing. According to Postman, our lives themselves would become a slideshow — and social media such as ChatGPT and Co. have at best added a few more slides.
GenAI is a strange special case here, is it not a medium through which we communicate acutely. Rather, it communicates with us — and the message is a replication of human material. Is this technology changing our society into what Postman dreaded? Because in many ways, GenAI brings together his criticism:
Whether Postman was excessively technophobic or whether the consequences of social transformation indeed They are as bad as described by him, remains to be seen. This is of course a nuanced matter, but we may be able to contribute at least some final personal experience.
Last year, we were able to conduct a small, internal experiment. One of our clients asked us to design a new business model — and we asked if we were working actively with our in-house LLM Navar should carry out. An idea that the customer was open to.
A total of four people were assigned to this project; with Navar, our team would be five people. Among other things, AI should help us with data analysis (without success, by the way, we had to do something ourselves right away) and, above all, in creating concepts. 500 in number within a very short period of time, then reduced to 180 and broken down to four in collaboration with the customer, which we would develop below.
Navar also helps us present the concepts by Lean Canvasses finished. Slides to communicate and review the models. However, to what extent is this now integrated into the central topic of this article?
As I said, this was also a new experience for us — and transparent communication was a key requirement in order to live up to our customer's trust. What the AI has done, where we have lent a hand, etc. Currently, many people still have a certain skepticism about a lot of AI-generated content, which gives us an obligation that we will keep at best: Wir communicate the medium and explain the differences to what is man-made. Social media, for example, already uses a lot of AI labels to indicate that something was created generatively. We treat our customer in a similar way, also to ensure that we work with AI and decide for ourselves instead of letting it work for us.
The latter scenario would not be perception through a screen, an image of our work — you would be the screen itself. AI is an assistive tool, not a universal solution, and as such, we must implement it. Perhaps this is also the fundamental difference to Postman's television dystopia. AI has its entertainment purposes — which, as is well known, are currently being critically discussed — but is not limited to them. It digests our reality based on the entered data sets and represents them on the basis of them, but is not limited to this; AI can do more than that.
Conversely, it is very difficult to classify it into Postman's model. However, we stick to this approach when it comes to GenAI: If the medium is the message, we must communicate the medium in order to get the best possible benefit from it and to be aware of all its risks. If we do that, we probably don't wear a screen as glasses and see the world, with all its technological change, independently. Perhaps GenAI could even serve as a final outlet for critical thinking, as it also teaches us one thing based on its hallucinations: Don't believe everything you see and read.
Shout-out to the innovators, thought leaders and co-designers who are taking responsibility:
On the local stage:
On the Global Stage:
Follow them, keep your head on and critically question again and again: Am I currently seeing the world with my own eyes or just through the screen? And in the case of the latter, it might be time to press the off button for a moment, grab a book and discuss it with us over a glass of red wine.
Cheers to the future! Because nothing is as constant as change.
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