-- How much of what Neil Postman was saying in 1985 still holds true today? How much do you agree with? How much do you disagree? Does he go too far sometimes? If so, where?
-- When Postman was interviewed for the PBS show, the World Wide Web hadn't been invented yet. How has the internet changed things? Are we more literate because of the internet, or less?
-- Do you find it ironic we're watching a TV show about a guy who says TV is killing the print media? And how about this: We're watching a TV show that aired 25 years ago on a medium of mass communication that hadn't even been invented yet? Any irony there?
Just askin'.
But as we keep reading John Vivian's "Media of Mass Communication," we'll keep on asking. You'll notice I'm not trying to answer the question. But I think it's a good question - do we live in a post-literate society? Did we used to be literate, and now we aren't? Good question, isn't it?
Who knows? We may encounter the same question on the midterm, or the final ... or a term paper assignment.
(By the way, did you notice the great big HINT in the paragraph above?)
There are some heavy thinkers who say we do have a a post-literate culture. One of them was Neil Postman, who taught at New York University before his death in 2003. In the mid-1980s he wrote a book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death." Its basic message was that TV treated serious subjects as if they were entertainment. He said books, print media, demanded more attention from readers, and TV was trivializing discourse in America, ie the way we talk about public issues. Postman said:
The name I give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition. Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for reasons I am most anxious to explain, the Age of Exposition began to pass, and the early signs of its replacement could be discerned. Its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business.It's no substitute for reading the book, but I'll link to a page of quotes from the book.
I'll also link to a 14-minute clip (embedded below) from a Public Broadcasting Service show on Postman's thesis - that we don't read anymore, and our culture is the poorer for it - as it appeared when his book came out in the 80s. That means it's 25 years old, but Postman is still influential. How much of what he was saying then still holds true today? How much do you agree with? How much do you disagree? Does he go too far sometimes? If so, where?
Another question: When Postman was interviewed for the PBS show, the World Wide Web hadn't been invented yet. How has the internet changed things? Are we more literate because of the internet, or less?
Here's a third question: Do you find it ironic we're watching a TV show about a guy who says TV is killing the print media? And how about this: We're watching a TV show that aired 25 years ago on a medium of mass communication that hadn't even been invented yet? Any irony there?
Post your answers to these questions are comments to this blog post.
2 comments:
1: I don't think much of what Postman was saying holds true today or was even true during the time to which he was referring. I think it's probably true that people are not reading as much for intellectual purposes, and if they are, it's not as in-depth, but I don't necessarily see this as a problem. Never is it acknowledged that fiction reading is just a beneficial as reading essays or news. I think he overgeneralizes to a point where he makes himself wrong. Television has effected the way we learn and how much we read, though. I think it's hard for me particularly to believe what he's saying because I read books all of the time, I read news when it's interested, and I research interesting scientific discoveries on my own time. And I know there are a lot of people out there like me and I don't know if television is responsible for the shortcomings of the other half of society. I do agree that reading is the most important activity a person can partake in to increase their knowledge and ability to think.
2: The internet has changed things drastically. Knowledge is out there and accessible - anything you want to know is a google search away. Just like television or books, the internet is a tool. How people use it is completely up to them. We can't blame television because people choose to watch Family Guy over the History Channel. Before television, certainly not everyone read and not everyone read quality books. Cheap entertainment existed before the tellyscreen. But the Internet means that entertainment is out there for those who seek to be entertained and enlightenment is out there for those who seek to learn. And the internet is a lovely place for intellectual discourse. I'm involved in a group of people that call themselves Nerdfighters - look it up, because this community uses all of the media at it's disposal to do remarkable things, all centered around this idea of being a nerd.
I think the internet has allowed for people who choose to be literate to be more literate and those who choose to be alliterate to be less literate.
3: I don't know about ironic, but I find it fascinating that he would agree to be on television. Obviously, this helps spread his idea to people who watch television rather than reading books, but at the same time, he seems like a bit of a hypocrite. He allows the same methods employed to make political debates interesting to be employed on his own interview. Maybe if he had said (or been allowed to say; maybe it was edited out?) something to the effect of trying to reach the masses through the television, despite the hypocrisy, it would have made sense. I think you're misusing the word "irony" in the second half of the question, but I do think it's interesting that we should watch something on a medium that wasn't even invented when the something was recorded. But that was a close-ended question, so I won't elaborate. You should know better, you were a journalist. Luckily, I'm not snarky and didn't answer just "yes" or "No" to your questions. =]
To some degree, what Postman is saying is true. Newspapers are in constant competion with TV and this competion grows more and more every year with new technology. Therefore, newspapers are using the inverted pyramid technique (putting the most interesting and/or impotant information in the first couple sentences or paragraphs of a article) to quickly grab a the readers attention and to get them intrigued. However, for Postman to say that newspaper dispensers are made to look like TV's to get customers to buy them is ridiculous. It would not do us much good to have a gray steel triangle box to sell newspapers, it's unappealing. What would he suggest we put them in instead? He also goes on to say that churches do not use the bible much anymore. Then what are the preachers sermons based on? I think that that may be a generaliztion, because people do read the bible and study it frequently. Also some of his refrences were outdated even for that period of time. Postman Coompared the speeches of Abraham Lincoln to those of Ronald Reagan. Lincoln was presdent up until 1865...Regan was president until 1989, that is a 124 year diffrence, of course the way things are done are going to naturally change over 100years.
However, The president of Sesame Street, Joan Cooney, made a good point to Postman. She stated that "[TV] is not going away", and that we need to turn our focus to making it "safer, better, and enlightening"
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