I read the book (Amusing Ourselves to Death), and I would recommend it for these reasons:

- It explores a contemporary topic of significance. Relevance will depend on your interests. I do think it's an essential perspective for analysing the impact of media on society, and since the impact has been huge and is still increasing, it's relevant to all kinds of public and policy decisions.

- I haven't read any other works that discusses the topic in a similar perspective and in comparable or greater detail. I've come across few works on this topic. * Postman's later books and essays aren't anywhere close to this either.

- It is dated, and talks about last century's media - however, it is even more applicable to this century's computers, games, and internet, which are much more "addictive".

Alan Kay recommended it. He kept bringing it up. I finally read it last week. It's awesome. I think you can apply what people did with the TV to how people use social media: a series of interruptions.

Someone posted the pdf of the 20th anniv. edition. Google: Amusing Ourselves to Death pdf

I only read a summary / excerpt / essay (don't which it was exactly and if it was from the book or another text by Postman on the same subject) quite some time ago.

His premise basically is that humans are increasingly becoming incapable of doing meaningful stuff or having meaningful conversations while gladly frittering away time for meaningless bullshit provided by the media.

While the dominant theme in his book naturally is TV the connection to today's social media usage and news consumption is quite obvious.

However, while the subject is important I'm not sure you need to read the entire book for the message to sink in.

Yes, IIRC parts where a little dull but it gave me a fresh point of view..

Remember thinking that TV did not end up causing all the problems he thought...

and then thinking that maybe it did, we just can't tell anymore

As an interesting piece of fiction? Yes. As moral philosophy? No.

First read was for college. It's a bit slow in places, wrong in a few, but especially prescient with social media.