Neil Postman

A media theorist whose 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death argued that television was reshaping public discourse into entertainment, making sustained argument and civic seriousness harder to sustain — a warning written before the internet existed and frequently cited since as having anticipated it. Across 20 books, including Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Technopoly, he built a sustained critique of how new technologies change not just what people know but how they think, delivered from his post as an NYU professor of media ecology.