Talk:Amusing Ourselves to Death

From Hc Edtech

Postman, in the first chapter of his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, draws from a variety of philosophers, writers, theorists, and his own and other's observations to make the case for the main argument of this work. He postulates that media, in whatever form - speech, print, imagery, television - changes the content and meaning of messages - what he terms "conversations", because different media "cannot accommodate the same ideas" (p. 8). To illustrate the point Postman allows that smoke signals can be used for simple messages, but they could not be used to express complex ideas. He states "you cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content" (p. 7). Postman clearly has an issue with the decline of the printed word, which in his opinion is host to more meaningful content, in favour of television which has its content manipulated to fit the visual medium. Further in his article, Postman, says that the “media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellect and social preoccupations.” (p.9) (God help us, the Trailer Park Boys have gone into the making of movies too.) As educators we should be aware of the changes in technology and how they will affect our culture. Just as Postman describes a cultural shift with the introduction of television with this work, in our time the Internet is playing a similar role and having a similar effect – many of which are to be determined. The Canadian guru of media culture, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, the medium is the message. Postman agreed with McLuhan’s thinking and took it one step further to say that the medium is the metaphor. Postman’s fear is that the general shift towards electronic media from printed media is what has produced this entertainment skew to the world around us, and the long term effect has a very negative shift in our culture.