Amused to Death

Quotes

" The album title came from a short book by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is about the history of the media, particularly as it relates to political communication - i.e., how things have changed since such works as Lincoln's speeches were made available for the general public to read."

Related Topics:
Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death - Lincoln's

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"And I had at one point this rather depressing image of some alien creature seeing the death of this planet and coming down in their spaceships and sniffing around and finding all our skeletons sitting around our TV sets and trying to work out why it was that our end came before its time, and they come to the conclusion that we amused ourselves to death."

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"Things coalesced slowly as I became more and more interested or obsessed, pick your word, with the inordinately powerful and all-encompassing effect that television seems to have on the human race. My general view is that television when it becomes commercialized and profit-based tends to trivialize and dehumanize our lives."

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"So I became interested in this idea of television as a two-edged sword, that it can be a great medium for spreading information and understanding between peoples, but when it's a tool of our slavish adherence to the incumbent philosophy that the free market is the god that we should all bow down to, it's a very dangerous medium. Because it's so powerful."

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"I think the motivation is at the root of its current evil, ie it's because they have to compete in an open marketplace that their standards get reduced so the programming tends to end up as the cheapest possible saleable item. I don't believe that wanting to beat the opposition makes for good programming, but it's an ideology that is still rigidly adhered to."

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: - Roger Waters, speaking about the album to the LA Times, September, 1992

Related Topics:
LA Times - September - 1992

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