Neil Postman | |
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| Born | March 8, 1931 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | October 5, 2003 (aged 72) New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer, professor |
| Education | State University of New York at Fredonia Columbia University |
| Period | 1959–2003 |
| Subjects |
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| Spouse | Shelley Ross |
| Children | 3, including Marc |
Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 – October 5, 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers, mobile devices, and cruise control in cars, and was critical of uses of technology, such as personal computers in school.[1] He is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), The Disappearance of Childhood(1982) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995).
If Neil Postman were alive today he would be livid and filled with rage at this fallen world for he had no idea when he died in 2003 that our world would come to TikToc and other online sources that thoroughly debase our mutual culture.
Postman was the supreme liberal critic of technology and champion of print in his time. He almost goes too far gushing about the power of print.
Postman says that America was founded by Enlightenment intellectuals. What he doesn't mention is that most of them owned slaves and sanctioned slavery in the Constitution.
He praises the literacy of the late 18th and 19th Centuries but doesn't mention slavery and that in the slaveholding states it was illegal to teach the enslaved to read.
He focuses on the Lincoln-Douglas debates with the point that their debates were learned and were like print in public discourse as if they were both reading their previously written comments.
Lincoln's Cooper Union speech would be inconceivable today.
The decline of public political discourse today is astounding.
Needless to say, Postman takes a totally Eurocentric view of the founding of American with no awareness of White Settler Nationalism/Racism, genocide, and slavery.
The end of the age of Typography and the ascendance of the age of Television (screens/digital). P. 8
In a print-culture we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must "draw them pictures" so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations. P. 26
We are getting sillier by the minute.
The rigors of print. P. 50
Reading encourages rationality. P. 51
The 18th Century Age of Reason was coexistent with the growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in the United State. P. 51
When ministers were great intellectuals. P. 54-55
In the 18th and 19th centuries lawyers were expected to be liberal intellectuals. The greatest was John Marshall. P. 57
The character of discourse in a person's mind is formed by the printed word. P. 58
In the beginning advertisers used to assume potential buyers were rational, literate, and analytical. P. 58
Conveying linear information in advertising eventually gave way to jingles at the turn of the century. P, 60
In the 18th and 19th centuries public figures were know by their printed words not their faces because few people knew what they looked like in person. The printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect. The first fifteen presidents would likely not have been recognized on the street as they passed by.whereas public figures today are thought of first as to how they look. This is the difference in thinking between a word-centered culture and an image-centered culture. P. 60-61
Testing a reader's "comprehension" would have seemed absurd. What is reading after all except comprehension? P. 61
Writing in the 80's, the author directs his fire at television. If he were alive today he would direct his ire at digitation of print and the proliferation of screens. I can see him talking about screens at gas pumps and talking about Facebook and TikToc and other online monstrosities. Postman would be frothing at the mouth with indignation at the precipitous decline of the literate life and the deterioration of public discourse.
He would say that today's media redefines the meaning of public discourse, trivializing it and rendering it meaningless. Digitizing continues a trend began by the telegraph and the photograph. It is not an extension of print. Young people today need to see pictures to understand. Visual learners they are sometimes called. P. 84
All subject matter should not be resented as entertainment. P. 87
Postman discusses the TV program "The Day After" controversial in 1983 as he critiques the "discussion" afterwards by well-known people in the context of making the point that TV is all entertainment and cannot do serious discussion of important issues. because TV always has to be entertaining. P. 88
Thinking does not play well on television. P. 90
The 1984 Presidential debate between Reagan and Mondale was about creating impressions not presenting reasoned positions on the issues. The best quips "wins" the debate. P. 97
"Now. . . This." Just as scary as "Uh, oh." P. 99
Television did not invent the now this worldview of quickly moving from one subject to another rapidly. It came from the intercourse between telegraphy and photography. It's amazing how much the author traces things back to the 19th Century and the telegraphy which first eased distances and the inventory of photography which gradually turned us into a visual civilization. P. 100
Media posit a new definition of truth based on the perceived credibility ot the messenger. Forget about facts and evidence. If the speaker is believed, then what he or says is true.. P. 101-102
Television news is not a serious form of public discourse. P. 104
What would Postman say about C-Span?
Technology is unstoppable. We can only try to understand and react accordingly.
Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least informed people in the Western world. P. 106
Postman would not be surprised at the emphasis these days on disinformation. His version goes something like this. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information---misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial---information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads away from knowing. This is the inevitable result when news is packaged as entertainment. We ae losing our sense of being well-informed. Ignorance is always coffectible. But what shall we do if wee take ignorance as knowledge? P. 107-108
"There can be no liberty for a community that lacks the means by which to detect lies." Walter Lippmann 1920
What about when the nation accepts the lies?
Television is the soma of Huxley's Brave New World and Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody. P. 111
Huxley knew that there is no need to conceal anything when the people are insensible to contradiction,
ignorant of history, taking false refuge in religion, not caring about lies, and narcotized by technology. P. 111
Technology defines the form in which the news is presented. P. 111
A Huxleyan world of technological narcotics. P. 112
Postman runs thru the religious scene exposing the TV preachers of his time. P. 114
You will wait a long time if you expect to hear a media preacher teach on how hard it is for a rich man to gain access to heaven. Ditto the Sermon on the Mount. P. 121
We are being rendered unfit to remember anything. p. 137
Orwell pictured the demolition of history by the state. He was correct with the book banning going on today. But Huxley was more correct since we have become stupefied no longer curious about history with history being downplayed in our schools in favor of STEM subjects.
Some of us prefer the slow-moving printed word, but our numbers are becoming fewer. P. 145
Print gives way to digital content. I assume Postman's commentary would be much the same as it was for television.
Postman says there is no need for Big Brother as we lull ourselves to sleep with trivia and cultural life is reduced to perpetual entertainments, when serious sounding public conversation becomes baby talk, and conversation if reduced to sound bites. P. 155
We live in Huxley's world.
Technology becomes ideology. P. 157
All Americans become Marxists as we believe that are moving a future technological paradise. P. 158
Trying to suggest technology timeouts is a waste of time. P. 159
Nothing will change. Postman's world-view and my world-view are over.
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