I firmly believe that I still have much learn about this subject, and I have not slowed down my research since turning in the manuscript for this book. To continue this journey along with me, and to get monthly recommendations of books (on this topic and all others) sign up for my reading list e-mail. It currently has nearly five thousand subscribers, and it’s a great and lively place to discuss books. I would love to hear your recommendations on it as well. Sign up at: ryanholiday.net/reading-newsletter
For a list of books that changed my life, check out the Ryan Holiday reading list: ryanholiday.net/reading-list
Some recommendations for books that greatly influenced what you just read are the following:
The Image a Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel Boorstin
If there was one book I wish I could force into more people’s hands, it would be The Image by Daniel Boorstin. In 1960, before talk radio, before Fox News or blogs, he wrote a scathing indictment of the deliberately false reality molded around us by our media culture. Boorstin’s book will shake you to your core. It made me want to write this book.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman
These are the spiritual sequels to The Image. Postman wants us to realize that there is something inherently inferior about the information we consume through visual media. As far TV producers are concerned, the worst thing that it could possibly do is inspire or provoke you, two horrible emotions that risk having you get up and leave your living room and miss the imminently scheduled set of commercials. You realize that the last thing we have to fear is a malicious Orwellian political censorship, because what we have already is so much worse: culture incentivized to be as shallow, fabricated, and captivating as possible—at the expense of what is actually real or true or meaningful. Technopoly is equally compelling; it tells us why the inventors of a technology are the absolutely worst people to listen to when it comes to deciding how to use it.
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism by Upton Sinclair
You probably don’t know this but in 1920 Upton Sinclair self-published a muckraking exposé of the corrupt and broken press system in America. Not only did he self-publish it—at the height of his fame, no less—but he refused to copyright it, hoping to pass through the media blacklist a critical book like his faced. It went on to sell more than 150,000 copies. This fascinating and deeply personal analysis of the media was the model for what I aspired to while writing my own. Sinclair deeply understood the economic incentives of early-twentieth-century journalism and thus could predict and analyze the manipulative effect it had on The Truth. Today those incentives and pressures are different, but they warp our information in a similar way.
News from Nowhere: Television and the News; Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism; The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood by Edward J Epstein
I used economic reasons to explain why bloggers act the way they do. I could not have done this without the father of this line of thinking, Edward Jay Epstein. From his 1973 Harvard thesis, which was later published as News from Nowhere, that pioneered the study of network news (the first and last person to get access to their inner sanctum) to his wonderful books on the movie business, Epstein finds, exposes, and explains the hidden economic factors that determine the courses of entire industries. I followed in his footsteps for this book at almost every turn. I had the privilege of meeting him recently, which only increased my advocacy for his methods. I am morally obligated to press his books into your hands just as they were pressed into mine by my mentors when I entered the entertainment business.