Amusing Ourselves To Death takes you through the history of media to highlight how entertainment's standing in society has risen to the point where our addiction to it undermines our independent thinking.

George Orwell's book 1984 has often been used as a warning of a dystopian future, with a totalitarian state controlling people's every move and enforcing a bland, joyless conformity.

But it was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that better predicted our present, imagining a world where people were so distracted with pleasure and entertainment that the government didn't need force to keep them in line.

Neil Postman was a media theorist, cultural critic, and professor at New York University, known for his opposition to all forms of digital media.

In this book, Postman argues that our increasing reliance on images over text is dumbing down our society, replacing information with entertainment.