Ever since God breathed life into Adam, mankind has been expressing their ideas and views through different forms of communication. Starting with oral traditions and continuing to the world wide web, the evolution of communication media has shaped the thinking of man. The book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman provides a fascinating commentary on how the cultural shift from a print-based culture to image-based culture has set humanity on a dangerous course toward a Huxleyan demise, where we are enslaved by our own desire for entertainment. This paradigm shift in how we find and interpret information has great ramifications in how we educate our children, practice our religion, view the world news, and interact in the political realm.
Postman opens up his argument by focusing on the concept of the medium of communication and how it represents, or is a metaphor, of how our culture creates the content for public interaction. An example used to express the content of this argument is observing a primitive mode of communication used by the American Indians, the smoke signal. The content contained in the signals can only represent certain ideas: philosophy and politics would likely not be one of them. The point of this example is that certain ideas and concepts are best articulated through a specific medium. Just as philosophy is not easily communicated through smoke in the sky, topics with depth and meaning may not be as easily discussed or expressed using an image-based medium. Postman focuses on the effects of typographic and image-based media.
Media to Postman does not only function as a structure through which information is conveyed, but in fact functions as the epistemology, or source of knowledge for the culture ...
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... like William Taft would never be elected in today's world. Image and form outweigh knowledge and experience, which leads to a country which has sub-par leadership.
The technological revolution has produced many benefits for today's society, but the constant desire to be entertained is not one of them. The shift from a typographical culture to the flashy image-based culture is leading our nation toward a glamorous demise. Changing back to the text based culture is not likely to happen, so the best remedy for this problem would be for one to become aware of the problem. One must put forth a conscious effort to stay critical of the ideas being fed to them. At the same time society must find ways to use this new technology for better uses than just entertainment. Doing so will allow humanity to continue to make this planet a better place for the generations to come.
This text was also among my most favorable topics, as I can relate to the generation of technology, its advances and consequences, and its role and influence on society. I evaluated three pieces of texts, all of which presented thorough research. My analysis was an investigation of a book I found to be an outstanding read, amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. I evaluated Postman’s argument, and incorporated and established my own stance and position towards the consequences of technology today and in the future on our society. I created a persuasive argument connected to Postman’s
Television and the visual culture are “creating new conceptions of knowledge and how it is acquired” (p. 145). Neil Postman in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death explains the effects of television and visual culture on the youth education curriculum. Postman believed it necessary to warn society of the consequences of living in a culture dominated by television. As for my opinion on this matter, I do not agree with Neil Postman’s statements in regards to television and our youth’s education. I believe it is not the crisis Neil Postman makes it out to be.
In the first chapter of Amusing Ourselves To Death , Neil Postman's major premise is how the rise of television media and the decline of print media is shaping the quality of information we receive.Postman describes how the medium controls the message, he uses examples which include the use of clocks, smoke signals, the alphabet, and glasses.Postman says a society that generally uses smoke signals is not likely to talk about philosophy because it would take to long and be too difficult. Postman also describes the way television changes peoples way of thinking; a fat person will not look good on TV and would less likely be elected President. On the other hand someones body is not important as their ideas when they are expressing them through the radio or print. On TV, visual imagery reigns. Therefore the form of TV works against the content of philosophy. Postman shows how the clock has changed. Postman describes how time was a product of nature measured by the sun and seasons. Now, time is measured by a machine using minutes and seconds. The clock changed us into time-watchers, then time-savers, and finally time-servers. Thus, changing the metaphor for time changed how we view time itself.
This era in modern society is simply recalled the “Age of the Television,” meaning that all exchange is in the form of entertainment, which shows that people care more about pleasuring one another and expressing themselves rather than focusing on accomplishing tasks or pressing issues. For example, when Paris was bombed last year, many people changed their Facebook profile pictures to a French flag to show support; however, this was merely another form of passivity, implying that they do not want to actively contribute to better the situation. Instead, these people would only like to give the semblance that they care to get praise and protect their ego. Consequently, all types of a society’s media foreshadow how truth will be displayed, reinforcing Huxley’s prediction that the “truth will be drowned in a sea of irrelevance,” and that irrelevance in today’s society is in the form of television and the
Postman bases his argument on the belief that public discourse in America, when governed by the epistemology of the printing press, was "generally coherent, serious, and rational" (16) because the reader was required to ingest, understand, and think about the logic of the author's arguments before coming to a verdict. In effect, intelligence in a print-based world "implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations" (26). However, with the emergence of television and its rapid ascendancy in our culture, Postman argues that discourse has become "shriveled and absurd" (16). TV, he says, assaults us with fleeting images and disconnected bits of information with no context except for the "pseudo-context" which is manufactured "to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use" (76). In effect, TV demands a certain kind of content-the "medium is the message" in the words of Marshall McLuhan-that Postman believes is suitable to the world of show business and hostile to the print-based world of logical thinking (80). This is not to say that TV ignores important subjects such as current affairs, politics, religion, science, and e...
Electronic media is inferior to print media due to the fact that electronic media can be bias, selective, and evasive for the purpose of entertainment. Electronic media serves as a form of entertainment with a main goal of serving their ratings rather than serving the people. It would seem that Postman would agree with this theory since he describes electronic media as a form of entertainment rather than a reliable source of information and facts in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Postman wrote 18 books and more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles. Postman's best known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985. It explores the decline of the communication medium as television images have replaced the written word. Postman argues that television confounds serious issues with entertainment, demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideas and more about image. He also argues that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only passive information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning. He draws on the ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan to argue that different media are appropriate for different kinds of knowledge, and describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures value and transfer information in different ways.
In Postman’s perspective, America has moved along with an incredible way of communication to accommodate itself with the several different interferences that are brought on by television. This ends up killing the printed language (156).
Are technology and the media shedding the very fabric of the existence we have known? As technology and the media spread their influence, the debate over the inherent advantages and disadvantages intensifies. Although opinions vary widely on the subject, two writers offer similar views: Professor Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, in her article “Can You Hear Me Now” and Naomi Rockler-Gladen, who formerly taught media studies at Colorado State University, with her article “Me Against the Media: From the Trenches of a Media Lit Class.” Turkle asserts that technology has changed how people develop and view themselves, while at the same time affecting their concepts of time management and focus (270). Similarly, Rockler-Gladen believes media and its inherent advertising have had a profound effect on the values and thinking of the public (284). I could not agree more with Professor Turkle and Ms. Rockler-Gladen; the effects technology and media have worried and annoyed me for quite so time. The benefits of technology and media are undeniable, but so then are the flaws. People are beginning to shift their focus away from the physical world to the virtual world as they find it easier and more comfortable. The intended purpose of technology and media was to be a tool to improve the quality of life, not shackles to tie people to their devices. I no longer recognize this changed world and long for the simple world of my youth.
He discusses the differences between the types of mediums used to convey messages. The types of mediums Postman discuss...
In Typographical America Neil Postman loves the idea of everyone getting involved even uneducated people could react to the discussions.
“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” The world’s highly respected genius, Albert Einstein, stated that without hesitation. Einstein’s quote is straight-forward as if he wanted to make his voice clear that this issue with technology is already heading towards an endless pit of disappointment. Some of those disappointment that Einstein have predicted are in media like movies and television, others in entertainment like games, and a main concern of many people, social media such as Facebook. This conversation about technology’s use has been argued and debated since the first advancement of technology; it is making our live easier which only lead us to become lazy. The
In today’s society, there is a strong indication that the status of images is improving. We live in a mediated blitz world of images. They fill our newspapers, magazines, books, clothes, billboards, computer monitors and television screens as never before in the history of mass communication. We are becoming a visually mediated society. For many, understanding of the world is being accomplished, not through reading words, but by reading images. Ever since I became a Mass Communication major, I noticed that the television culture is replacing words as the important factor in social communication. Words will be reserved for only bureaucratic transactions through business forms and in books that will only be read by a few individuals. Reading is losing to watching because viewing requires little mental processing. Visual communication has the ability to convey messages, but this “language” means nothing to those who can only read words and not images.
The impact of technology on our individual lives and culture has been a general issue of our time. In her essay “In the Beginning Was the Word,” Christine Rosen analyzes the effects of the image-dominated modern society and its influence on our daily lives, as well our comprehension skills of complex literature acquired through the years of human history. In “Three Tweets for the Web” Tyler Cowan analyzes the effects of a new cultural medium of our society and its effectiveness on multitasking as well as increasing intellectual satisfaction of our highly literal modern society. Rosen and Cowan both present the evidence that our society is in a midst of a culture transition, and printed world is being a less central part of our lives. This cultural transition affects our daily activities in many ways; such as, stimulating distractions, duration of attention span and our efficiency at multitasking.
In conclusion, the medium is the message. The way that information is presented to us plays a key role in our understanding of the topic itself. By framing the crisis in Egypt a particular way, both the old and new media sources are able to give the audience two separate understandings of the social and cultural issues at hand. The media is less interested in telling the audience about the actual story and more interested in the underlying messages of society they provide. These underlying messages lead us to define social and cultural issues the way that the media want us to. Since the media sell us both products and ideas, both personalities and worldviews, the message becomes the medium.