Concept
Postman’s framing of two opposite failure modes for an information ecosystem. The Orwell mode: control by inflicted pain — censorship, surveillance, information withheld. The Huxley mode: control by inflicted pleasure — truth not concealed but drowned in a sea of engaging irrelevance. The book’s diagnosis sits squarely in the Huxley mode: the modern failure is abundance optimized for engagement, not scarcity enforced by a censor.
Connections
- Defined in: Political Economy of Attention
- Discussed in: Ch 7 — Emotional Memetics As The Floor, Ch 10 — Political Economy of Attention
- Evidenced by: Amusing Ourselves to Death
This is a graph landing page. Use the local graph and backlinks (right) to explore, or open the interactive ontology.