GOING DOWN THE TUBE: REVIEW

Aldous Huxley, Mr. [Neil Postman] says, was right in ''Brave New World'' and George Orwell, in ''Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' was wrong. Orwell assumed that we would surrender our taste and freedom of mind to externally imposed forces. Huxley thought we would be more susceptible to seduction or corruption and our decline or decadence would come disguised as entertainment. Looking back in ''Brave New World Revisited,'' he observed that our social thinkers ''failed to take into account man's almost infinite capacity for distractions.'' Huxley's prophecy, that we would be undone by pleasure, is the more sophisticated of the two. This, of course, is Marshall McLuhan's theme, but Mr. Postman has extended, refined and updated it. For McLuhan, ''the medium is the message''; for Mr. Postman, ''the medium is the metaphor.'' But television's metaphors bear little resemblance to the condensations of meaning we find in fiction and poetry. They are closer to cartoons, the kind of thing we have in mind when we say, ''Do I have to draw you a picture?'' Television, according to Mr. Postman, is life as a cartoon or comic strip. Thinking is not a television metaphor, for it doesn't ''play well.'' It isn't ''a performing art.'' Mr. Postman, who also wrote ''The Disappearance of Childhood'' and ''Teaching as a Subversive Activity,'' is almost religiously loyal to the printed word. He interprets the Bible's ''Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image'' as a warning that only the Word can be trusted to convey the truth. Television traffics in blasphemy. The unnecessary is its province, information so divorced from all context that it has become merely a commodity, a thing without consequences. Television also specializes in ''broken time'' and attention, making our experience seem even more discontinuous than it is. The best part of television is its junk; it is most damaging when it tries to be good, when it reduces our seriousness to show business.