Roger Waters' 1992 album Amused to Death is titled 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. Nor do I have the inclination for any other reason. 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.[6]
