Reflective essay on Having Fun Until Death by PostmanIn Having Fun Until Death, Postman provides a critical analysis of the media environment in 1985. Explores the role and impact of the media addressing different sectors of society, naming religion, politics, news and education. Although this book was written before 1985, its relevance today is much more evident than ever; We live in a nation where entertainment is the focus and purpose of every sector of American society and where our notion of truth or knowledge has been significantly redefined. That is, we are “on the verge of being entertained to death” (4) in this contemporary 2014 media environment by being constantly exposed to the Internet (e.g. Twitter, email, Blackboard, YouTube); while our notation for knowing whether something is accurate revolves around the lines of: Google it. In Postman's novel, we are given the general thesis with the following sentence: "we are a people on the verge of having fun until we die" (4). It is through this phrase that Postman is able to convey his critical analysis of the media environment in 1985. His critical analysis revolves around television; explains how this technology has altered the way Americans think and go about their daily lives. He goes on to explain how television has reshaped epistemology and led Americans to expect some form of “entertainment” from every sector of society. In other words, the way we knew something as truth, or gained knowledge from, was altered because of television and simultaneously made Americans expect politics, religion, education, and news ( just to name a few) were “fun. “The postman's bases are in the center of the card…they are unusually short, its design relying heavily on images, charts, and other graphic elements, some of them printed in various colors” (111). addresses how pre-television Americana was based on the printed word, which appealed to consistency. However, with the shift from an American printing society to a television-based society, television can be said to “promote inconsistency and banality” (80). It was the introduction of television that our public discourse suffered; the way we talk and think about things has changed (even though our message may be the same as before television). In short, Postman states how our notion of “being informed” (107) has been reshaped by television. Television creates misinformation, or misleading information because it acts as an illusion of knowledge about a topic and because news is presented as a form of entertainment.