Neil Postman (1931–2003)

This book, originally published in 1985, warns against the proliferation of television media replacing printed texts. Much of Postman’s case comes across as a tome against television and cites renowned authors like Aldous Huxley and Marshall McLuhan in support of his thesis. However, 35-40 years after its original publishing, it’s easy to see how digital media (i.e., the computer and the Internet) have continued to revolutionize America’s information intake. Our goal now is simply to show more keep up with the “fire hydrant” of information output instead of merely choosing one technology over another. Yes, the goal is simply to learn and retain from all media instead of to privilege one over the other. In this sense, the book falls sorely short of anticipating future conundrums.

Postman rightly observes how television media tends to put us to sleep instead of making us engaged learners. That’s why I am still a passionate advocate of book learning. His emphasis on understanding the forms of media is likewise appreciated. However, Postman idealizes a past age (in the 1800s) when books and newspapers were the main/only form of educational technology. He sees this as a golden age that we need to return to. He forgets how much rote memorization was required then in education and how social inequities like slavery, discrimination, and a lack of women’s suffrage persisted in that age. Technology also has its benefits – say, speeding up social economies, which produces greater wealth.

Postman’s basic premise is that television is bad and traditional reading is good. This is a false dichotomy, I suggest. While I wholeheartedly support becoming aware of pro’s and con’s of various forms of media, the challenge becomes to learn to learn from all forms of media. When learning itself becomes a passion, it ultimately selects between forms of media appropriately. A “culture war” against one form of media – which is what Postman seems to suggest – distracts from the point. I’m not sure how his thesis would have been received in 1985, but in 2022, “the age of show business” has become the “information age.” New challenges of a hyper-connected world confront us. This book, for all its timeliness in the 1980s, does not predict these future challenges. I still suggest reading McLuhan (an author Postman relies upon) instead of this work for a more universal paradigm of media. show less

Thought provoking. A very prescient, for its day, insight into the trouble with technologies, particularly the way we unthinkingly embrace all technology as an advance and sign off progress instead of considering the consequences of a trivialized onslaught of information that is worse than meaningless as it renders us dumb and confused in a world divorced from connection and historical perspective and meaning. Postman cautions the reader to beware of polls (always ask, what was being asked! show more I.e is it okay to smoke while praying? No. Is it okay to pray while smoking? Yes) all subjects should be taught as history, not just history. He wants to find reverence again in religion but here I think he misses the opportunity for secular faith which will bring us or of our destructive extractive culture…but overall very good and thoughtful. The medium is the message. show less

Dated in a chilling way. Postman's central thesis that television is/was the dominant medium of the late 20th century is quaint because it's half right: literacy and engagement through the written word are dead; but television's reign would be a short one.

But the issues he predicted: demogauguery, disinformation, and detachment are absolutely the central problems of the modern age that tv helped build.

Another pithy Neil Postman polemic! And he's mostly right, too. Once one becomes familiar with Neil Postman, I think one can read individual chapters as stand-alone essays.

So, I went straight to Chapter 9: Scientism, as I already have a dismissive attitude to the so-called "social sciences", based on reading works written fairly long ago, like Feynman's essay on "Cargo Cult Science" and more recent things, like the psychological experiments on a frozen salmon. Bad ideas of scientism as show more Postman lists them:

1. The methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior.
2. Social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis.
3. Faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.

He points out that both scientists and "social scientists" use quantities, that's not proof that they're doing the same thing, any more than it's proof that accountants are doing science. Both sometimes do things that they call experiments, of course. "Social science" is, he points out, unfalsifiable. "Social science" is our modern substitute for the kind of thing we might usually seek through the reading of novels, and learn more by so doing. What is going on in "social science" is the establishment of a mythology.

Good quotation:
"Unlike science, social research never rediscovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again."

Chapter 10, "The Great Symbol Drain" is a bit harder to follow. I think I'm so constructed that anything that has symbolic meaning has to be complicated. A flag, for instance, means nothing to me in itself, even if the country does. Postman also talks about more complicated symbols, those that arise in religion for example. He claims that the reproduction of images makes them less meaningful, but I'm not sure that's true, either. His statement that cultures must find narratives is interesting in 2020, but chilling because it makes comparisons of the USA in 2021 with the Germany of the pre-WWII years all too easy to see as illuminating or plausible. There is a brief foray into education and a somewhat prescient remark about how "education must become a tribal affair; that is, each subculture must find its own story and symbols, and use them as the moral basis of education." This isn't what's happening, now a single subculture is asserting its incoherent philosophy of education as far as it can.

There is an excellent quotation from Plato's Phaedrus in Chapter 1. Below is a slightly different translation:
"""
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
"""

That's our internet, alright. show less