The late Neil Postman is my bridge to the former print culture with which I identify and a certain criticism of technology with which I also identify. He is a bit of a Luddite but so am I. I accept technology but abjure some parts of it.
I read Neil Postman primarily to feel good about being a print person.
Enlightenment. A philosophical movement of the eighteenth century focusing on criticism of previously accepted doctrines and institutions from the point of view of rationalism. P. 3
The future is, of course, an illusion. As in Oakland, there is no there there. P. 5
In a theocratic world, everyone is a fundamentalist. P. 16
The best way to look to the future is to first look to the past for guidance says Postman. His main point of reference is the 18th Century.
Writing in 1999 Postman says, "The most obvious question to be asked about any new technology---for example, interactive television, virtual reality, the Internet, or, for that matter, doorknobs and toasters that understand human speech---is What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?" P. 42
Good point I suppose, but Professor Postman doesn't fully understand technology. There need be no new problem to solve. Entertaining technology has its own motives. I laugh thinking what Postman would say about TikTok, which they say has taken over the Internet but solves no problems of which I am aware though I assume you can say that TikTok informs in its own way and in a way that entertains millions of people.
"This question needs to be asked because there are technologies that are employed---indeed, invented--to solve problems that no normal person would regard as significant. Of course, any technology can be marketed to create an illusion of significance, but an intelligent, aware person need not believe it. Do we believe that having access to forty or fifty stations, that they are not sufficient to provide the information that we need? Is to a matter of celebrating our technological genius?" P. 42-43
Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science. Advice that comes from people who have no philosophical perspective is likely to e arid, if not dangerous. P. 44
We need to be very careful in determining who will benefit from a technology and who will pay for it. P. 45
More computers and remote learning. Bill Gates must love this kind of stupidity. P. 48
It is doubtful one can think of a single technology that does not generate new problems as a result of having solved an old problem. P. 48
It's hard to product the results of technological solutions. Gutenberg's moveable type led to the dissolution of the Holy Roman Em[re and the break-up of Catholicism. P 49
Unpleasantness may result from solving an old problem. P. 49
All technological changes result in unforeseen circumstances. P. 49
A new technology changes the structure of discourse. It does so by encouraging certain uses of intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence, and by demanding a certain kind of content. Ronald Reagan could never have become president without television. Reagan rarely spoke precisely and if eloquent he was simplistic; yet he was called The Great Communicator. He WAS good at speaking DOWN to the average voter in this country. He was magic on television no matter what he said because he came across as authentic, caring, and intimate. P. 51
Marx says that technology is a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists on certain kinds of content, certain kinds of personalities, and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience. P. 52
To use the term "distance learning" to refer to students and a teacher sending e-mails to each other may have some value, but it obscures that the reading of a book its the best example of distance learning possible, for reading for reding not only triumphs over the limitations of space and co-presence but of time as well. P. 54
The erosion of language in our time would drive Postman batty. "Facts" and "Alternative Facts?" Oh, my! P. 54
Postman says he's been called a dinosaur, reminds us that dinosaur lived for a hundred million years. Though not a model of this digital age, he looks at every technology as what it can do for him personally. He did his writing in longhand and sae the Internet as a distraction. He did not own a computer. He did not have voice or call-waiting. His car has cruise control but he doesn't use it but he doesn't use it because he finds that keeping his foot on the gas pedal to not be a problem. P. 55
In the social sciences and humanities technology in the classroom has not improved teaching and student learning. Most students probably still don't know in what year the colonies proclaimed their independence and in what century the Civil War took place. P. 56-57
The Enlightenment understanding of language is preferable to the postmodern understanding. P. 58
For Postman the Age of Enlightenment was also the Age of Prose. Montaigne invented the essay. Francis Bacon was also an essayist. P. 58-59
The eighteenth century saw a decline in the use of Latin. P. 59
Most of us have not succumbed to the pleasuresof meaningless language. We struggle as best we can to connect our words to the world of non-words. At least we hope our words resonate to the people we are addressing. But today we should worry that young people might become entangled in faddish academic flimflam. Rather than reading Derrida they should be reading Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Swift, Madison, or any of the other writers of the Enlightenment period who believed that, of all the difficulties in mastering language, it is possible to say what you mean, to mean what you say and to be silent when you have nothing to say. They believed that it is possible to say things about the world that are true---true, meaning that they are testable and verifiable, that there is evidence for believing. They believed in lucid language to help them know when they were speaking truly or falsely. Philosophers who try to say that language is a snare and a delusion would not find favor with the Enlightenment writers. Gibberish and falsehoods are so easily promulgated today. P. 80-81
Information stand-alone began in the 19th Century with telegraphy and photography. IN the 18tth information always had to have context.
The author says we need narratives, but what if there is no narrative? What if there is no natural law?
Postman seems to believe that we must have a story, but what is that story? I suggest there can be many stories. All of us will not settle on the same one. If there is no Divine Providence then one story is that we must still believe that there is one. P. 108
Scripture read as universal Truth, not a human telling, degreases to. . . to what? To Inquisition, Jihad, Holocaust. . . and people flee. In either case, certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal. P. 114
The Federalist Papers along with Common Sense are perhaps the two best examples of the influence of the print in this country. P. 143
Childhood was invented in the 17th Century and achieved its present form in the 18th. Childhood is not a biological necessity; it is a social construction. P. 116
. . . . so feeble was my constitution, so precarious my life, that in the baptism of my brothers, my father's prudence successively repeated my Christian name of Edward, that, in case of the departure of the eldest son, this patronymic appellation might still bb perpetuated in the family. (Edward Gibbon) P. 117
John Locke gave us the mind at birth as tabla rosa. P. 119
Rousseau abandoned his own children to orphanages. P. 120
The psychology of children us fundamentally different from that of adults. We must know their psychology in order to teach them because childhood most closely resembles the "state of nature." Rousseau valued this state more than anyone since except maybe Californians. P. 120
Rousseau thought children that children only one book: Robinson Crusoe because of its state of nature theme. P. 120
There were therefore two intellectual theories of childhood going into the 19th and 20th Centuries: Lockean and Rousseauian. P. 121
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