3.+AMUSING+OURSELVES+TO+DEATH



APA Citation: Postman, N. (1985). //Amusing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of show business.// New York, NY: Penguin.

Foreword: Postman begins his critique by revisiting the two great dystopic novels of the mid-20th century: Aldous Huxley's //Brave New World// and George Orwell's //1984//. Orwell once noted that, "if you want to see the future, imagine a boot stamping a human face -- forever." Totalitarianism would be externally imposed and use the weapons of force and surveillance to control the public. In many ways, this is an exaggerated description of life in the former Communist bloc and third-world dictatorships around the world. Huxley advanced another possibility: we would be controlled by pleasure, not pain. Our erstwhile leaders would marinate us in trivia, mediocrity, and guilty pleasures. Postman describes the difference: media type="youtube" key="fMZejVltDDs" height="345" width="560" align="center"

p. xix **"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy . . . This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell was right."**

In this chapter, Postman outlines his thesis that American culture is increasingly becoming show business. He notes that in previous times cities such as Boston, Chicago, and New York epitomized their eras that proclaimed the values of democracy, industry, and commerce, but the city of our period is Las Vegas (and perhaps LA) that celebrates spectacle and superficiality. Postman picks his examples deliberately because the fields he describes in this book -- education, journalism, business, and religion -- and supposed to be "serious" stuff. If they are infected with the entertainment bug, what hope do other areas of society have? Aesthetics trumps ethics.
 * THE MEDIUM IS THE METAPHOR**


 * pg.3-4 **". . . all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have become transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death."**

pg. 6. Postman believes what is driving this change is the modes of communication and generalizes the argument by looking at communication in other cultures and historical periods. The basic axis is the movement from oral to written to visual communication. He notes that he "fixes [his] attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of culture."

While Postman clearly has Television in mind, his argument could be extended to the Age of Digital Media -- facebook, twitter, the internet -- that our ability to have and express complex thoughts is diminished by the dominant mode of communication. This is an important debate in education because some education reformers embrace the notion of "Web 2.0" and encourage the acquisition of digital communication skills in schools to prepare students for the "21st century." Postman's argument would suggest they are wrong.

Postman acknowledges his debt to Marshall McLuhan -- who your probably have not heard of -- but was an influential social critics in the 1960s and 1970s for a book titled //The Medium is the Message// that argued that the form of communication is becoming more important than the content of communication. He goes further and notes the religious prohibitions on graven images and the common equation of God with "the Word." The Christian gospel of John begins with the following formula: "In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God . . ." Postman believes that this gives us insight into worldview of preliterate societies who depended primarily on oral communication. As "symbolic" (words and pictures) representations advance, our ability to understand physical reality recedes. A recent Japanese anime//, Summer Wars,// describes a futuristic world where people communicate primarily through digital avatars in the electronic world of "Oz" and the danger to real life when the symbolic world crashes. In addition, the science fiction //Matrix// trilogy raises similar themes. However, as significant as the mode of communication can be, its effects are subtle and largely unnoticed as Postman observes media type="youtube" key="IsLwVoZqEjk" height="352" width="467"media type="youtube" key="UM5yepZ21pI" height="352" width="461" Postman makes a parallel to our notion of time and how it differed when time was measured by hourly chimes or bells instead of mechanical watches. Some economic historians (David Landes) argue that the main difference between Modern Europe and East Asia is the development of mechanical clocks. Europe, despite being behind in all sorts of technology to Asia (excepting Japan), developed clocks first and this spawned many of the developments that characterize a modern society. The measurement of time changes how people think about time, just as a written language changes how people communicate. Postman extend the point explicitly to the development of alphabets. The written word also changes human cognition at a perceptual system.
 * pg. 11 **"What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed. A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at this watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch."**
 * **pg. 11 ". . .beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the season, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded . . . Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events."**
 * **pg. 12 ". . . That the alphabet introduced new form of conversation between man and man is by now a commonplace among scholars. To be able to //see// one's utterances rather than only to hears them is no small matter, though our education, once again, has little to say about this. Nonetheless, it is clear that phonetic writing created a new conception of knowledge, as well as a new sense of intelligence, of audience and of posterity, all of which Plato recognized at an early stage in the development of texts. 'NO man of intelligence . . . will venture to express his philosophical views in language, especially not in language that is unchangeable, which is true of that which set down in written characters.' . . . Philosophy cannot exist without criticism, and writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist -- all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading."**
 * **pg. 12. ". . . writing would bring about a perceptual revolution: a shift from the ear to the eye as an organ of language processing . . . Northrop Frye has remarked, 'the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination."**
 * **pg. 13. ". . . our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics. What I mean to point out here is that the introduction into a culture of technique such as writing or a clock is not merely an extension of man's power to bind time but a transformation of his way of thinking--and, of course, of the content of his culture. And that is what I mean to say by calling a medium a metaphor."**

media type="youtube" key="VFi7ToUfjUs" height="345" width="420" align="center"
 * MEDIA AS EPISTEMOLOGY**

Postman makes an important distinction in this chapter. Most people who criticize television (and web content of various kinds) focus on the content. The content is either immoral, brain candy, violent, sexually provocative, etc., but Postman is more concerned that our forms of communication are also forms of "knowing." How do we know what we know? For example, about foreign countries or wars that we do not directly experience. Postman is not concerned that there is a lot of junk entertainment on TV, but TV, as a form of communication that is mainly good at entertainment, will displace or trivialize things that are, or should be, serious. Truth is not independent of the way we express it. We tend to find certain forms more persuasive or credible than others. This is true of different activities, such as research or law where evidence has to be in a certain forms (numbers, hard-copy, documentation, etc.). We should consider Postman's examples here in detail that take up the next few pages, but the main point remains that Postman's point here is that our dominant form of communication forms the basis of what is taken to be "truth" for different purposes. There are many ways to know, but if certain ways are privileged, it enhances or impedes our ability to perform certain tasks or demonstrate the value of certain arguments and beliefs in public discourse. In particular, Americans tend to deprecate "book knowledge" (reading is believing) in lieu of "street smarts" (doing is believing). Postman's discussion of intelligence in oral cultures brings two abilities to the fore: cleverness and memory. Most of how intelligence in school is measured derives from emphasis put on memory, such as memorizing vocabulary words or a chapter in a science or history textbook. In an age when information is a simple "google search" away, this may be less important. However, we still test and assess this way. The emphasis on cleverness can be thought in terms of a rap artist who is highly articulate in spoken languages, especially in impromptu "smack downs," but has difficultly making a prepared speech or debate. We often take the ability to read for granted, a natural progression as students mature. Experience tells us something different as we know many people struggle to read or read proficiently. Postman notes some of the basic habits necessary to read effectively, such as the discipline to ignore words "as pictures" -- something that I personally have experienced working with Asian languages and the ability to sit still. Students who suffer from dysgraphia or dyslexia have similar problems when reading and have been diagnosed as "slow" or "stupid." Have you ever had the problem of setting yourself to read and get sleepy, distracted, or fidgety after a few pages? Reading takes active engagement, while listening to a TV can be done passively. Parsing text from subtext, i.e., reading comprehension, is also difficult because reading excludes all of the non-verbal communication and cues we use to understand communication such as facial expressions, tone, pitch, etc. (your dog picks up on them). This especially can be a problem when reading books that are not contemporary. Reading Dickens or Shakespeare (or watching a B&W movie) is difficult for a contemporary individual. You must also be able to work your mind on two tracks because one does not have the back-and-forth that distinguishes dialogues and one can "lose one's place" much easier when reading. However, thinking abstractly, which is necessary when thinking about systems or mathematics or history also presents a hurdle. John Dewey, the famous American educator, thought that all knowledge could be made practical and tangible, but this works better for some subjects than others.
 * **pg. 16. "I raise no objection to television's junk. The best things on television //are// its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claism as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is a its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations . . . To talk seriously about television, one must therefore talk of epistemology."**
 * **pg. 22-3. ". . . the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the 'truth' is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of its as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant."**
 * **pg. 24. "In saying this, I am not making a case for epistemological relativism. Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them. Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute. And that is why it is necessary for me to drive hard the point that the weight assigned to any form of truth-telling is a function of the influence of media of communication. 'Seeing is believing' has always had a preeminent status as an epistemological axiom, but 'saying is believing,' 'reading is believing,' 'counting is believing,' 'deducing is believing,' and 'feeling is believing' are others that have risen or fallen in importance as cultures have undergone media change. As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it."**
 * **pg.24-5. "Since intelligence is primarily defined as one's capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication. In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability . . . In a print culture, people with such a talent are though to be quaint at best, more likely pompous bores. In a purely oral culture, a high value is always placed on the power to memorize, for where there are no written words, the human mind must function as a mobile library. To forget how something is to be said or done is a danger to the community and a gross form of stupidity. In a print culture, the memorization of a poem, a menu, a law or most anything else is merely charming. It is almost always functionally irrelevant and certainly not considered a sign of high intelligence."**
 * **pg. 25. ". . .[consider] what is demanded of you //as your read this book//. You are required, first of all, to remain more or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this (with this or any other book) our culture may label you as anything from hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some sort of intellectual deficiency . . . You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be though stupid . . . you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity . . . meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words and the logic of the argument . . . you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author's attitude toward the subject and toward the reader . . .the difference between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality of the argument, you be able to do several things at once, including delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished, holding in mind questions until you have determined where, when or if the text answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your relevant experience as a counterargument to what is being proposed. You must also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and experience which . . . do not have a bearing on the argument. And in preparing yourself to do all this, you must have divested yourself of the belief that words are magical and, above all, have learned to negotiate the world of abstractions . . . 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."**

media type="youtube" key="VWNHLKW7n5c" height="345" width="560" align="center"
 * TYPOGRAPHIC AMERICA**

Postman begins with an interchange between Benjamin Franklin and the elders of the Dunker (Pacifist, related to Quakers) Church. They respond that they did not wish to write their beliefs down in print because it would keep future generations from improving on their imperfect beliefs and precepts. Typography freezes thought across time. Socrates (through Plato) issues a similar criticism of that nasty new invention -- books -- in the //Phaedo//. In fact, most major religious and philosophical leaders did not write down their own ideas: Confucius, Jesus, Plato, Aristotle (his "writings" are lecture notes taken down by his students), Buddha, etc. because of the fear of rigidity of thought. Proper intellectual discourse was verbal -- a dialogue between two individuals that continued to evolve over time. Postman will cite typography/writing as critically important to rational thought because it allows the examination of thought over time and at a distance and to parse ideas granularly. It also protects the fidelity of ideas over time, instead of a generational game of "telephone." Postman quotes the Dunkers' response to Franklin. The printed word was also the beginning of education as we know it. It allowed people to transcend local communities and began the notion of "general" and "universal" knowledge that could be transmitted to a wider body of people. If it was not written down, it did not really exist, a version of "if a tree falls in the forest . . ." became "if something happens, and it is not written down, did it really occur?" Postman also notes how the printed word was democratizing, especially in early America. In the past, writing was the monopoly of scribes and priests, while common people communicated exclusively through spoken language. However, in a society where everyone can and does read, it levels the playing field and establishes the foundation for democratic societies. One of the implicit critiques of digital media is that it can be and often is controlled from a central location. Most of TV and Radio content is produced by a small group of individuals who are not representative of the public as a whole. Increasingly, the same could be said of the internet. Postman uses the case of Thomas Paine to make his point. The key is not that someone of Paine's station wrote anything, it was that others were not surprised that he wrote and wrote well. Part of the secret of the printed world's power is that it did not have to compete with other forms of communication, it had a monopoly over public discourse. In part because individuals could not carry conversations over a distance (i.e., by phone) nor could they disseminate their ideas any other way. Tocqueville's note on how it shaped American verbal communication is telling. Today, most people write like they speak (or text) and the problem with their writing is that they do not changes their communication conventions with the different modes of communication. As a result, written English has come to resemble spoken English and this can limit what content is communicated effectively. As a student of Asian languages where individuals can be fluent in the spoken language while having little or no facility in written forms or literate suggests the same. Postman's quoting Marx has nothing to do with Marxism (or Communism). It is simply notes that certain forms of literature, such as the epic poem, are unlikely to be created today, and even if they were, would find no audience. One of my teachers once remarked that the generation who could read the philosopher Hegel (or Kant) effectively has died and this is why he is ignored in this century even though he was the dominant philosopher of the previous century. In addition, in an age when few people go to see one or three-act plays, movies, their replacement, source their material from other sources, such as TV shows or comic books. Most of the movies in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were adapted from stage plays with actors whose primary experience was proscenium stage acting for audiences who would appreciate the character acting of those performances. Not so much today.
 * **pg. 30. "'. . . we fear that, if we should feel ourselves as if bound and confined by it, and perhaps be unwilling to receive further improvement, and our successors still more so, as conceiving what we their elders and founders had done, to be something sacred, never to be departed from.'"**
 * **pg. 33. "Beginning in the sixteenth century, a great epistemological shift had taken place in which knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and made manifest through, the printed page. 'More than any other device,' Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, 'the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; . . . print made a greater impression than actual events . . . To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-learning.' In light of this, we may assume that the schooling of the young was understood by the colonists not only as a moral duty but as an intellectual imperative."**
 * **pg. 34. "One significant implication of this situation is that no literary aristocracy emerged in Colonial America. Reading was not regarded as an elitist activity, and printed matter was spread evenly among all kinds of people. A thriving, classless reading culture developed because, as Daniel Boorstin writes, 'It was diffuse. Its center was everywhere because it was nowhere. Every man was close to what [printed matter] talked about . . . The poorest laborer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar . . . Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a reader.'"**
 * **pg. 35. "It is worth pausing here for a moment to say something of Thomas Paine, for in an important way he is a measure of the high and wide literacy that existed in his time . . . Paine . . . came from the lowest laboring class before he arrived in America. In spite of these disadvantages, Paine wrote political philosophy and polemics the equal in lucidity and vitality (although not quantity) of Voltaire's, Rousseau's, . . . Yet no one asked the question, How could an unschooled stay-maker from England's impoverished class produce such stunning prose? From time to time Paine's lack of education was pointed out by his enemies (and he, himself, felt inferior because of this deficiency), but it was never doubted that such powers of written expression could originate from a common man."**
 * **pg. 41. "The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of its //monopoly//. This point cannot be stressed enough, especially for those who are reluctant to acknowledge profound differences in the media environments of then and now . . . Public business was channeled into and expressed through print, which became the model, the metaphor, and the measure of all discourse. The resonances of the lineal, analytical structure of print, and in particular, of expository prose, could be felt everywhere. For example, in how people talked. Tocqueville remarks on this in //Democracy in America.// 'An American,' he wrote, 'cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say 'Gentlemen' to the person with whom he is conversing.' This odd practice is less a reflection of an American's obstinacy than of his modeling his conversational style on the structure of the printed word. Since the printed word is impersonal and is addressed to an invisible audience, what Tocqueville is describing here is a kind of printed orality, which was observable in diverse forms of oral discourse."**
 * **pg. 42-3. ". . .I offer Karl Marx from //The German Ideology//. 'Is the //Iliad// possible,' he asks rhetorically, 'when the printing press and even printing machines exist? Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease; that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?' Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure of discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience."**


 * THE TYPOGRAPHIC MIND**

media type="youtube" key="lRzx3lxQWNs" height="345" width="420" align="center"

This chapter begins with a description of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and Postman observes that the audiences, not at all atypical, would sit for up to seven hours listening to prepared speeches. I think this is an important point to remember when we discuss student attention spans. Attention spans may be a function of what our experience is. One becomes accclimated to the medium one is exposed to. 18th century Americans were socialized to typography and therefore had little problem processing and comprehending speech and writing in this form. It should also be remarked that today, in many European countries, political essays tend to be bestsellers, while in the U.S.A. .. . If one was to take a literal transcript of verbal communication, one would notice that little of it makes sense. People do not talk in complete sentences, they are frequently vague, and peppered with "ya' knows'" and other expressions (In Japanese = aizuchi). Written language must conform to specific conventions, i.e. subjects AND predicates with semantical meaning and strong together by syntax. This forces written speech to express clear, analyzable thoughts, unlike graphic or oral communication, which may signify nothing. An experiment would be saying something mean to your pet and see if it responds to the lexcial meaning of your words or the tone of voice you use. As many people have noted, being able to write clearly is a reflection of being able to think clearly, and vice versa. Much of PR (public relations) is about how to be taken seriously while saying large helpings of nothing. Postman extends the point to the reader as well as the writer. The reader must be put into a particular mindset to read effectively, which conditions their own thought to be more analytic and rational. The relationship between writer and reader is much different than speaker and audience. Much of education claims to teach "critical thinking" as if that skillset was seperable from content-knowledge. Postman argues the opposite: it is emergent from the activity of reading. Postman describes the use of different medium in three different spheres: legal thinking, academic research, and marketing. One of the key innovations of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall was the requirement for the court to give WRITTEN opinions. They could not only affirm or dissent, but were required to give specific reasons for their decisions and subsequent courts had to draw upon the written precedent to justify their decisions. Postman makes the same point with respect to advertising. In the past, advertisements were arguments and instructions; they were informational and all text. Clearly, contemporary ads bear little resemblance to their ancestors. Postman puts "exposition" at the heart of the Typographic America and "Show Business" at the heart of 20th century digital communication.
 * **pg. 44-5. "What kind of audience was this? Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate themselves to seven hours of oratory? . . . Typically at county or state fairs, programs included many speakers, most of whom were allotted three hours for their arguments. And since is was preferred that speakers no go unanswered, their opponents were allotted equal length of time . . . For one thing, its attention span would obviously have been extraordinary by current standards. Is there any audience Americans today who could endure seven hours of talk? or five? or three? Especially without pictures of any kind? Second, these audiences must have had an equally extraordinary capacity to comprehend lengthy and complex sentences aurally . . .It is hard to imagine the present occupant of the White House being capable of constructing such clauses in similar circumstances. And if he were, he would surely do so at the risk of burdening the comprehension of concentration of his audience. People of a television culture need 'plain language' both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law."**
 * **pg. 48. "Both speakers and their audience were habituated to a kind of oratory that may be described as literary. For all of the hoopla and socializing surrounding the event, the speakers had little to offer, and audiences little to expect, but language. And the language that was offered was clearly modeled on the style of the written word . . . This language is pure print. That the occasion required it to be spoken aloud cannot obscure that fact. And that the audience was able to process it through the ear is remarkable only to people whose culture no longer resonates powerfully with the printed word . . .[They] wrote all their speeches in advance, [and] they also planned their rebuttals in writing. Even the spontaneous interactions between the speakers were expressed in a sentence structure, sentence length and rhetorical organization which took their form from writing . . . the resonance of typography was ever-present."**
 * **pg. 49-50. ". . . the obvious fact that the written word . . . //has a content//: a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content . . . Whenever language is the principal medium of communication--especially language controlled by the rigors of print--an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result . . . If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell. As a consequence a language-centered discourse such as was characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America tends to be both content-laden and serious, all the more so when it takes its form from print."**
 * **pg. 50. "It is serious because meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect. This is especially the case with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, they become confused, they over-generalize, they abuse logic and, sometimes, common sense. The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one's intellect thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity."**
 * **pg. 51. ". . . [Reading] encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the 'analytic management of knowledge.' To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making, and reasoning . . . To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached."**
 * **pg. 56-7. "The differences between the character of discourse in a print-based culture and the character of discourse in a television-based culture are also evident if one looks at the legal** **system . . . The insistence on a liberal, rational, and articulate legal mind was reinforced by the fact that America had a written constitution, as did all of its component states, and that law did not grow by chance but was explicitly formulated. A lawyer needed to be a writing and reading man par excellence, for reason was the principal authority upon which legal questions were to be decided. John Marshall was, of course, the great 'paragon of reason . . . He was the preeminent example of Typographic Man--detached, analytical, devoted to logic, abhorring contradiction. It was said of him that he never used analogy as a principal support of his arguments. Rather, he introduced most of his decisions with the phrase 'It is admitted . . .' Once one admitted his premises, one was usually forced to accept his conclusion."**
 * **pg. 59-60. "Not until almost a hundred years after Revere's announcement were there any serious attempts by advertisers to overcome the lineal, typographic form demanded by publishers. And not until the end of the nineteenth century did advertising move fully into its modern mode of discourse. As late as 1890, advertising, still understood to consist of words, was regarded as an essentially serious and rational enterprise whose purpose was to convey information and make claims in propositional form . . . Words cannot guarantee their truth content. Rather, they assemble a context in which the question, Is this true or false? is relevant. In the 1890's that context was shattered, first by the massive intrusion of illustrations and photographs, then by the nonpropositional use of language."**
 * **pg. 63. "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."**

media type="youtube" key="MA75LqsNKy4" height="345" width="420" align="center"
 * THE PEEK-A-BOO WORLD**

So, what changed? Postman quotes Henry David Thoreau, who made a prescient observation on the laying of the Transatlantic Cable. Yes, we would have more information quicker, but the information would be more trivial. There is not more important information just because the capacity to transmit it increases. Like 24-hour cable news organizations, the need to fill time would lead to an inclination to choose "junk" or "filler" information or rely on information from sources that produced daily/hourly information. Here is the quote from Thoreau. Postman describes the content of electronic communiication as irrelevant, impotent, and incoherent. Electronic communication made information a commodity that was produced in quantity and agnostic to quality or context. The dissemination and reception of information becomes fragmented. Information is not provided upon need to make a decision or take an action; there is a constant stream of information and consumers of information must actively filter what is relevant and irrelevant. The distinction between the information's "signal" and "noise" became more difficult. While typography forced the author to organize and structure their thoughts and forced the reader to digest it analytically, digital media does not. Books are intended to "freeze thought" in perpetuity, but digital media is ephemeral. Instant updates that became "old news" almost as soon as they are transmitted. The time horizon of information is shrunk to the present and the comprehension of the present in context of the past and future becomes more difficult. Images put the focus on concrete particularities, and abhor the general and the abstract. They do not need context because "seeing is believing." To fill the need for constant information, "pseudo-events" such as press conferences, staged speeches displace actual "news." Reality becomes staged. The "peek-a-boo" metaphor refers to the ephermerality and impermanence of information in a digital age and also suggests why individuals may not be concerend as their information becomes less valuable; it is more entertaining. The problem with entertainment is not that there is something wrong with fun, it is when serious decisions are made on the basis of their entertainment value.
 * **pg. 65. "'We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."**
 * **pg. 65. "The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography's definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attached merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a 'thing' that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.**
 * **pg.68. "In both oral and typographic cultures, information derives its importance from the possibilities of action. Of course, in any communication environment, input (what one is informed about) always exceeds output (the possibilities of action based on information). But the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote. For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency."**
 * **pg. 69-70. "Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention . . . The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it, or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography. Books, for example, are an excellent container for the accumulation, quiet scrutiny and organized analysis of information and ideas. It takes time to write a book, and to read one; time to discuss its contents and to make judgments about their merit, including the form of their presentation. A book is an attempt to make thought permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past . . . The value of telegraphy is undermined by applying the tests of permanence, continuity, or coherence . . . Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form had startling characteristics: Its language was the language of headlines--sensational, fragmented, impersonal. News took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch. Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it . . . To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing //of// lots of things, not knowing //about// them."**
 * **pg. 72. "To begin with, photography is a language that speaks only in particularities. Its vocabulary of images is limited to concrete representation. Unlike words and sentences, the photograph does not present to us an idea or concept about the world . . . a photograph cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract . . . By this he means that the photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea."**
 * **pg. 76. "In //The Image//, Boorstin calls the major creation of the graphic revolution the 'pseudo-event' by which he means an event specifically staged to be reported--like the press conference, say. I mean to suggest here that a more significant legacy of the telegraph and the photograph may be the pseudo//-//context. A pseudo-context is a structure invented to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use . . . The pseudo-context is the last refuge, so to say, of a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence."**
 * **pg.77-8. " . . . the ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world--a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child's game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining . . . there is nothing wrong with playing peek-a-boo. And there is nothing wrong with entertainment . . .The problems come when we try to //live// in them.**

media type="youtube" key="J5RJ0XtN-2o" height="379" width="462" align="left"media type="youtube" key="UvUsSgDuZR4" height="379" width="462" align="left"
 * TEACHING AS AN AMUSING ACTIVITY**

Neil Postman was originally a professor of education and wrote several books on education and pedagogy prior to this book. He is critical of approaches to education that aim to be entertaining more than edifying. In his sights is the popular "Sesame Street" program. The origins of Sesame Street came from the idea of a program consisting of commercials, but commercials that would aim to teach skills (This episode brought to you by the letter Q, etc.). The point, like Postman made earlier about Thomas Paine, is that teaching through commercials did not seem curious to anyone. Programs like Sesame Street work to establish the norm that education and curriculum should be judged on its entertainment value; students will learn if they are more interested (entertained). Postman outlines how educating by TV is different, not because of its substantive content, but because of the new context if gives to education. Sesame Street does not sell education to television, it sells television to education and rationalizes the worst aspects of television due to their educational value. Postman wants to make sure how revolutionary the educational philosophy that comes in on the wings of digital media. There is a difference between student interest, emotive engagement, and entertainment. Making education easier and enjoyable may not make it more effective. Digital media is ungraded; it is always pitched at the level of the lowest common denominator. It aims as mass communication and therefore it tends to reduce complexity, sophistication, or content to the level where no previous experience or ability is required. It avoids challenging students or perplexing them. It is afraid that any difficulties will drive the watcher to another pursuit, therefore the recipient should be accommodated at every turn. Digital media also avoid exposition, i.e., explanation that is propositional that requires affirmation or rejection, instead it relies on pat narratives and well-worn images to convey material. The mind does not have to actively engage material, but can passively absorb it. Instead of being a buttress for education, TV and digital media became the tail wagging the dog and put books in a secondary position as the medium of education. Emulation of TV is not integration of the technology into pedagogy.
 * **pg. 142. "There could not have been a safer bet when it began in 1969 than that 'Sesame Street' would be embraced by children, parents, and educators. Children loved it because they were raised on television commercials, which they intuitively knew were the most carefully crafted entertainments on television. To those who had not yet been to school, even to those who had just started, the idea of being //taught// by a series of commercials did not seem peculiar. And that television should entertain them was taken as a matter of course."**
 * **pg. 143. "We now know that 'Sesame Street' encourages children to love school only if school is like 'Sesame Street.' Which is to say, we now know that 'Sesame Street' undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents. Whereas a classroom is a place of social interaction, the space in front of a television set is a private preserve. Whereas in a classroom, one may ask a teacher questions, one can ask nothing of a television screen. Whereas school is centered on the development of language, television demands attention to images. Whereas attending school is a legal requirement, watching television is an act of choice. Whereas in school, one fails to attend to the teacher at the risk of punishment, no penalties exist for failing to attend to the television screen. Whereas to behave oneself in school means to observe rules of public decorum, television watching requires no such observances, has no concept of public decorum. Whereas in a classroom, fun is never more than a means to and end, on television it is end in itself."**
 * **pg. 144. "Just as reading a book--any kind of book--promotes a particular orientation toward learning, watching a television show does the same. [Television shows] are as effective as 'Sesame Street' in promoting what might be called the television style of learning. And this style of learning is, by its nature, hostile to what has been called book-learning or its hand-maiden, school-learning. If we are to blame 'Sesame Street' for anything, it is for the pretense that it is any ally of the classroom . . . As a television show, and a good one, 'Sesame Street' does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television."**
 * **pg. 144. "It is important to add that whether or not 'Sesame Street' teaches children their letters and numbers is entirely irrelevant. We may take as our guide here John Dewey's observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote //in Experience and Education//: 'Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes . . . may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history . . . For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.' In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about //how// one learns."**
 * **pg. 145. "We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organized around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic image. The classroom is, at the moment, still tied to the printed word, although that connection is rapidly weakening."**
 * **pg. 146. ". . . television's principal contribution to educational philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable. This entirely original conception is to be found nowhere in educational discourses, from Confucius to Plato to Cicero to Locke to John Dewey. In searching the literature of education, you will find it said by some that children will learn best when they are interested in what they are learning. You will find it said--Plato and Dewey emphasized this--that reason is best cultivated when it is rooted in robust emotional ground. You will even find some who say that learning is best facilitated by a loving and benign teacher. But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably, and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment. Education philosophers have assumed that becoming acculturated is difficult because it necessarily involves the imposition of restraints. They have argued that there must be a sequence to learning, that perseverance and a certain measure of perspiration are indispensable, that individual pleasures must be frequently be submerged in the interests of group cohesion, and that learning to be critical and to think conceptually and rigorously do not come esily to the young but are a hard-fought victories."**
 * **pg. 147-8. "The commandments are as follows: //Thou shalt have no preparation//. Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required.** **There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation . . . //Thou shalt induce no perplexity . . .// perplexity is a superhighway to low ratings. A perplexed learner is a learner who will turn to another station. This means that there must be nothign that has to be remembered, studied, applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount. //Thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt . . .// Arguments, hypotheses, discussions, reasons, refutations or any of the traditional instruments of reasoned discourse turn television into radio or, worse, third-rate printed manner. Thus television-teaching always takes the form of story-telling . . . Nothing will be taught . . . that cannot be both visualized and placed in a theatrical context. The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity, and exposition is entertainment."**
 * **pg. 148-9. "Teachers, from primary grades through college, are increasing the visual stimulation of their lessons; are reducing the amount of exposition their students must cope with; are relying less on reading and writing assignments; and are reluctantly concluding that the principal means by which student interest may be engaged is entertainment. With no difficulty I could fill the remaining pages of this chapter with examples of teachers' efforts--in some instnaces, unconscious--to make their classrooms into second-rate television shows."**
 * **pg. 153. "And that, of course, is what we have got in 'The Voyage of the Mimi.' The fact that this adventure sit-com is accompanied by lavishly illustrated books and computer games only underscores that the television presentation controls the curriculum. The books whose pictures the students will scan and the computer games the students will play are dictated by the content of the television shows, not the other way around. Books, it would appear, have now become an audio-visual aid; the principal carrier of content of education is the television show, and its principal claim for a preeminent place in the curriculum is that it is entertaining."**

media type="youtube" key="JovJr_LmAP8" height="352" width="492" align="center"

[]