Entertained Into Submission: How Media Became a Tool of Control

For nearly five decades, my work as a media ecologist has been shaped by the foundational teachings of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. These two scholars, building upon the dystopian warnings of H.G. Welles and Aldous Huxley, outlined a clear and prescient vision of how media shapes our culture, society, business, and politics. Today, their concerns are no longer theoretical. The trajectory they traced from a literate culture to an image-dominated, entertainment-obsessed society is now our lived reality. The warnings they issued have materialized, and the question before us is whether we are still capable of thinking -- or merely laughing, as Postman forewarned.

McLuhan famously declared, "The medium is the message." His assertion that media, rather than the content it carries, reshapes our cognitive processes and societal structures is more relevant today than ever. The evolution of media has moved from print to broadcast, to digital, and now to an era dominated by artificial intelligence and algorithmic determinism. This shift has profoundly altered not just what we know, but how we know. Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, built upon McLuhan’s insights, observing that we have become a society that prioritizes entertainment over critical thought, willingly numbed by a deluge of distraction.

Their insights trace back to the speculative warnings of Welles and Huxley, both of whom envisioned futures in which the structures of media and communication were manipulated to control societies. Welles' The War of the Worlds dramatized the power of mass media to create hysteria and shape public perception. Huxley’s Brave New World described a society in which control was not maintained through brute force, but through pleasure -- entertainment as a tool of pacification.

Postman, citing Huxley, famously pointed out that our downfall would not be Orwellian repression but rather our own willingness to be distracted and entertained into passivity. “What afflicted the people in Brave New World,” Postman wrote, “was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

The parallels between the media landscape of today and these cautionary visions are inescapable. In an era of deepfake videos, algorithmic manipulation, and information silos, we no longer merely consume media -- we exist within it. Our political realities are shaped not by a contest of ideas, but by a competition for engagement. Attention has become the ultimate commodity, and those who control media platforms wield greater influence than traditional political institutions.

This is the culmination of the path McLuhan and Postman described. In The Global Village, McLuhan warned that while the world was becoming more interconnected, this did not necessarily mean greater understanding. Instead, he foresaw a world of "retribalization," in which media would fragment societies into competing ideological enclaves. Social media has realized this vision with a precision that McLuhan could scarcely have imagined. Algorithms do not foster debate; they amplify division. The echo chambers of our digital media environment ensure that we are constantly affirmed, rarely challenged, and increasingly alienated from any shared reality.

Postman’s fear that television would erode serious discourse has found its ultimate expression in the digital age. The dominance of visual and ephemeral content -- short-form videos, memes, and AI-generated imagery -- has accelerated the trend away from complex thought. We live in an age where books are dismissed in favor of soundbites, and policy debates are reduced to viral clips designed to provoke rather than inform. As Ray Bradbury illustrated in Fahrenheit 451, the most effective form of censorship is not through overt prohibition but through overwhelming distraction. Why burn books when you can simply make people uninterested in reading them?

This is the crisis of media ecology today: our tools of communication, rather than enlightening and educating, have become instruments of manipulation. The very technologies that were meant to democratize knowledge have instead entrenched misinformation, facilitated the rise of digital demagogues, and numbed the public into complacency.

The blueprint for this evolution was laid out by Welles, Huxley, McLuhan, and Postman. And yet, their work is not merely a set of predictions. It is also a guide to resistance. If McLuhan identified the medium as the message, then it follows that we must actively shape the media environment if we are to shape our future. If Postman saw the battle between education and disaster, then it is education -- not mere information -- that must be our priority.

As a media ecologist, my role is to continue this lineage of thought, not merely to diagnose the crisis but to illuminate a path forward. The intersection of media, technology, and politics must be examined with rigor, and our engagement with media must be intentional. We must resist the temptation to surrender to passive consumption and instead reclaim our agency in the media environment.

We stand at a precipice. The media we create and consume will determine not just the fate of politics, business, and culture, but the very nature of human thought itself. The choice before us is stark: do we continue down the path of distraction and division, or do we reclaim media as a tool for knowledge, connection, and genuine progress? This is the challenge of the new global village, and it is one we must confront with urgency, awareness, and, above all, thought.