The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas.

Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles.

Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words.

Roger Waters' 1992 album Amused to Death is named after Postman's book, and is in part inspired by and deals with some of the same subject matter.

[2] In The End of Education, Postman remarked that the album's reference to his work,[3][4] ...so elevated my prestige among undergraduates that I am hardly in a position to repudiate him or his kind of music.

Nonetheless, the level of sensibility required to appreciate the music of Roger Waters is both different and lower than what is required to appreciate, let us say, a Chopin étude.Postman's concept of the "information-action ratio" was referenced in the Arctic Monkeys song "Four Out of Five" off the band's 2018 album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, where the Information Action Ratio is the name of a fictional taqueria on the moon.

[5] In a 2019 interview with Kjersti Flaa, comic and actor Zach Galifianakis references Amusing Ourselves to Death with the line "you will stop hearing the term 'big brother' because we will do it to ourselves."

Galifianakis employed the quotation in response to a question the interviewer asked about whether or not he uses social media, to which he replied with a denunciation of the negative effects of the internet on society in general.