Team Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death

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-	==Themes==	+	QyeTxP I am so grateful for your blog.Really looking forward to read more. Awesome.
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-	===Main Theme===	+
-	Television is making us all dumber. Generation X, a product of the television nanny, has trouble focusing. They are often unable to employ the higher level reasoning skills, which take concentration and other characteristics.	+
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-	===Media-Metaphor Shift===	+
-	"A great media-metaphor shift (from typography to television) has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense."	+
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-	===Epistemological Bias===	+
-	Postman tells us how television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instance to an exquisite and dangerous perfection..and it brought them into the home.	+
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-	===Television as Entertainment===	+
-	television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase serious television is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice-the voice of entertainment. He attempts to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms. Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.	+
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-	===Sesame Street===	+
-	Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.	+
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	==Author==		==Author==

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Revision as of 12:09, 20 September 2012

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Contents 1 Author 1.1 Educational Background 1.2 Postman's persona 1.3 Postman's Death 1.4 Quotes By Neil Postman

Author

Educational Background

Postman was born in New York City and grew up there most of his life. He graduated from State University of New York at Fredonia in 1953. He received a master's degree in 1955 and an Ed.D in 1958, both from the Teachers College, Columbia University, and started teaching at New York University (NYU) in 1959. In 1971, he founded a graduate program in media ecology at the Steinhardt School of Education of NYU. In 1993 he was appointed a University Professor, the only one in the School of Education, and was chairman of the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002.

Postman's persona

Postman was known as an excellent public speaker, a man full of poise, and his best attribute terribly good humor (Rosen). Not only did Postman write about how technology was negative, but lived that way too. Rosen states that Postman would always say, You have to understand, what Americans do is watch television. I am not saying that's who they are. But that is what they do. Americans watch television (Rosen). Postman refused any technology thought to improve something in which he had never requested improvements (Rosen). He resented being controlled by technology.

Postman's Death

Postman passed away on October 5, 2003 after a long battle with lung cancer. He was 72 years old. Click here to see his obituary in the New York Times.

Quotes By Neil Postman

"Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology"

"Americans are the best entertained and the least informed people in the world."

"Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods."

"The authority of a definition rests entirely on its usefulness, not on its correctness (whatever that means); and it is a form of stupidity to accept without reflection someone else's definition of a word, a problem, or a situation"

"The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch..."

"I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether"

"What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school."

"Once you have learned how to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know."

"We have transformed information into a form of garbage, and ourselves into garbage collectors."

"There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory."

"We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation."

"All knowledge begins with a question."

Cited:

Rosen, Jay. Press Think http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2003/10/07/postman_life.html

Argia.com