Team Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death
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Summary
In his book, Postman states that he believes that our culture has lost all sense of true communication. All we do is watch TV, and then allow that to spur our conversations and that we rely on TV for all of our news coverage. He follows the development of the different communication media throughout the years starting with the letter, to the printing press, to the newspapers, and so forth. Postman supports the early types of communication because they were full of information and knowledge that was needed for the mind to thrive. With the invention of the telegraph and photograph he begins to see the new ways to acquire knowledge; it is no longer just about the printed word.
According to Postman, we have lost all forms of public discourse. With the invention of television, he finds the faults in the shallow news stories broadcast every night. The first televised political debate is one of Postman's main arguments because he sees this as politicians merely becoming celebrities. Lastly, he is disturbed by shows such as Sesame Street because parents view this as learning when all it is doing is teaching children to love television. Postman argues that we should defeat the TV era and not rely on it for every aspect of our lives, we should control our own lives.
Vocabulary
The following are ten terms that one should be aware of before reading Postman's book.
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement in Western philosophy. It was an age of optimism, tempered by the realistic recognition of the sad state of the human condition and the need for major reforms. At its core was a critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs, and morals. Some classifications of this period also include the late 17th century, which is typically known as the Age of Reason.
Discourse
Discourse is a linguistic unit composed of several sentences; in other words, conversations, arguments, or speeches. Discourse can be observed in the use of spoken, written and signed language and multimodal/multimedia forms of communication, and is not found only in 'non-fictional' or verbal materials.
Disinformation
Disinformation is the deliberate dissemination of false information. It may include the distribution of forged documents, manuscripts, and photographs, or propagation of malicious rumors and fabricated intelligence. Unlike traditional propaganda and "big lie" techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions.
Epistemology
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge. It primarily addresses the following questions: "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", and "What do people know?"
Exposition
Exposition is a technique by which background information about the characters, events, or setting is conveyed in a novel, play, movie or other work of fiction. This information can be presented through dialog, description, flashbacks, or even directly through narrative. The alternative to exposition is to convey background information indirectly though action, which, though more dramatic, is more time consuming and less concise.
Federal Communications Act of 1934
The Federal Communication Act of 1934 largely combined and reorganized existing provisions of law, including provisions of the Federal Radio Act of 1927 relating to radio licensing, and of the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910 relating to telephone service. The Act also replaced the Federal Radio Commission with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). It also transferred regulation of interstate telephone services from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the FCC.
Iconography
Iconography is the content of images, the typical depiction in images of a subject, and related senses. It is also a branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word itself literally means "image writing."
Lyceum Movement
The Lyceum Movement was a trend in architecture in the United States in the 19th century inspired by Aristotle's Lyceum in ancient Greece. The lyceum movement, with its lectures, dramatic performances, class instructions, and debates, contributed significantly to the education of the adult American in the nineteenth century and provided the cultural framework for many of the areas of influence. Noted lecturers, entertainers and readers would travel the "lyceum circuit," going from town to town or state to state to entertain, speak, or debate in a variety of locations.
Plain Language
Plain language is clear, modern, unpretentious language carefully written to ease understanding. It is language that avoids obscurity, inflated vocabulary and convoluted construction.
Relativism
Relativism is the idea that some element or aspect of experience or culture is relative to, i.e., dependent on, some other element or aspect. The term often refers to truth relativism, which is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture.
Modern Application
Like all pieces of literature, this book can only stand the test of time if it can be applied to the present. Some of the examples are obvious, such as the examples of the presidential election and Las Vegas, but other applications are a little more subtle. The two most important modern day shifts that can be made from the book about shifting more towards today's culture is going from "And Now This" Culture to "What's Next" and from the culture of TV to the culture of the Internet.
And Now This
Postman states that the most worrisome words are "Now this", but today they are rarely uttered. Between Tivo and the internet, there is little time for an announcer to say those words. News Stories have shortened to sentence long blurbs with a picture to illustrate and you can ignore what is on by simply clicking away or fast forwarding. Postman would probably announce that this is a magnification of every point he has made in the book.
The culture of TV
In the time of this book, the internet wasn't around and was by no means popular. The foreword speaks of an "MTV driven world," but one could argue that it has become a "Facebook driven world." Both are true, reality shows are a point of reference and television even changes the realm of religion for some. However, today, it is nothing to examine the change of a relationship as valid by asking, "Is it Facebook Official?" Today, lives are recorded online, people are "googled" in order to become credible, and arguments aren't won or lost until the Wikipedia article has been brought up. As for entertainment as and educational tool, Oregon Trail is played in almost every school and one of the best gifts a kid can get is a Vtech computer. Once again, all these things Postman would probably relate as a magnification of the arguments against the Tv, but probably even more serious.
Themes
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.
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."
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. (p. 78)
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. (p. 80)
Sesame Street
Sesame Street does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television. (Pg. 144)
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
