I was a skeptic when Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business came out in 1985. A book attacking the frivolity of television seemed, well, frivolous, just another trendy overhyped attack on the way we live now. Hadn’t people always loved pop culture, entertainment, fun? Hadn’t public discourse always included plenty of show business? I was so hostile to the idea that anything fundamental had changed for the worse since Elizabethans flocked to watch