After reading the first three chapters of Amusing Ourselves to Death, what would you say is the major premise of Postman's book? Do you find yourself in agreement with it? Why or why not?
Be as specific and concrete as possible in your response (such as by including examples). Please respond no latter than 4 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 5.
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Throughout my reading of the book, I found many instances where Postman says that the decline of print-based knowledge is ruining public life. I believe that this is the main premise for his book. On page 24 he says, “I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.” He further invokes his opinion by saying that “epistemology created by television not only is inferior...but is dangerous and absurdist.” With all this negativity towards televised media, I found it strange that on page 29 he says that he is not making a total assault on television. I thought it was pretty clear that he was and I do not agree him. Tracing back to his story about the boy who was denounced for having speech as a source in his thesis, I feel like it does not matter the mode of communication so much as the content. I think he needs to accept that the world is changing and new methods of communication are coming forth. Someone who does not change with the world gets left behind. It is about evolving and adapting to the world around you. When past methods don’t work anymore, you need to change them. I understand what the boy’s University was saying about the spoken word disappearing and the written word enduring. I also understand things can be said in a casual way, making them not serious. However, I believe that if something is spoken by a trustworthy person and can be traced back to the truth just like written sources then why is it less credible? If I was that boy I would have argued to the death. Overall, I really disagree with Postman. I think he needs to stop living in the past and adapt before he is left behind (that is if he is still living.)
Postman died some years ago. He was around to see the dawning of the digital age, but not its apothesis. In any case, he is arguing something much more than that print is a better technology than TV. What he's saying is far more radical and is applicable to all media, print, electronic, or digital. Please econsider what he is saying the relation between media technology & media content is. He says at one point that a car is more than a faster horse. So too with TV; it's more than a faster & more convenient method of mass communication. The car transformed the very landscape of America (the development of the interstate highway system, the booming growth of suburbs, etc.). Think similarly about media technology. Postman's argument isn't the same old stuff. The mental categories we've been given for discussing media performance are shallow & absurd when compared to what Postman is proposing.
I believe the major premise of Postman’s book is, to put it simply, the relationship between what he calls the “medium” or “metaphor” of communication and its holistic effect on a culture. More deeply, I think Postman aims to show why a print medium of conversation is more beneficial towards a culture than a televised medium, and what the shift from one mode of communication to another will mean for the future of human thought and philosophy and therefore, human society. As Postman himself states, “this book is an inquiry into…the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of the Age of Typography and the ascendancy of the Age of Television.” I find it interesting that Postman calls this shift a cultural fact, rather than a social one, as that not only affords communication an intrinsic place in culture but makes it the backbone. Postman makes several references to the fact that the mode of communication in a culture impacts that culture’s structure, the most prominent examples thus far being those in his second chapter. He moves from a description of the oral society of an African tribe into a description of the American print-based society, making the contrast between cultures all the more pronounced. I am mostly in agreement with Postman’s premise, but I cannot stop myself from wondering what he would think of the fact that I am posting a critique of his book on cultural communication on a blog.
grace -
i actually have a video of postman talking about computers, though not the internet. i'll show it in class within the next couple of weeks.
The major premise of this book is not to only assault television in an attempt to bring print based media back to the forefront, but to hold up a mirror to the American. American colonists living in Massachusets and Connceticut in 1640-1700 were the "highest concentration of literate males in the world at that time."(pg 31)I believe Postman's desire and goal of this book is to help American's realize that we were the most knowledgeable population in our earlier days; pamphlets circulating each day arguing political point of views as well as upstart papers to gain attention for certain issues. We were a pro-active, print based population that has traded in a printing press for a dark room and a bright tv that brings the news in the cheekiest way possible; complete with funny sound effects and entertainment news it is a far cry from where this nation started. It is postman's goal in this novel to be the catalyst for a nation wide revelation. "My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom," the term favoring applies to Television specifically. telelvision panders to our more primitive qualities with use of slapstick comedy, crude humor and sound effects that don't make the viewer think or further themselves intellectually. Postman realized this fatal trend of softening US News and it was his objective to help prevent the watchdog from turning into a lapdog.
I ordered the book last week, but still have not received it. Based on the answers so far I am pretty excited to read Postman's book.
I hope that this will not stop my comments from being irrelevant, however...
In reference to media as content and speaking about television, I see how this creates an issue. Television, unequivocally, has to be one of the most simple tasks performed by humans on a daily basis. It requires nothing more than pressing a few buttons and reserving the tiniest spark of interest so that one who watches can have open eyes and a (semi) turned on brain.
I do not mean to suggest that I am TV free. No, indeed. I may not have cable, but I find ways to zone out in front of the tube.
The problem in this lies in how are brains are functioning. Like earlier stated, It takes little effort to watch TV -- how much energy does it take to read a chapter of a book? After an hour of reading I can sleep for a day, and I like to read! The problem lies in brain expenditure. Most people just don't do it anymore. A day of classes can be the same way. Going to class requires minimal physical effort, yet at the end of the day I find myself very drained (and from what I gather, most others do, too). So what's the best thing for a long day of classes? A book? A magazine? Research? Probably not. My bet is on a cold, dark beer and a few hours of television to waste away the evening. That's my take thus far.
I believe Postman gets right to the heart of his concern within the first few paragraph's of his text. He makes the metaphor of different cities representing different times in America and ends in with an image of Las Vegas. "For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment." (Page 3) While Postman's view of the TV ruining America may seem outdated and more than a little curmudgeon-like, the basic idea that Americans are overly entertained and that media outlets lack simple factual information rings very true in our modern digital society. This thought is so relevant even thirty years later because of how flashy and over opinionated the American media has become and how it feels that the public must be spoon fed ever little bit of information with some humor or a ridiculous graphic.
Just from reading through the first three chapters of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, I can already tell that Postman was brilliant and extremely ahead of his time. In chapter two, he outlined what I believe to be his main argument when he wrote “my argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content—in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling” (27). The truth is constructed, in part, by the communicative medium through which is it expressed, but also by the conversation it sparks in the people receiving the information. Postman, however, dismisses the idea that all truth is equal. He says that television is at its most “dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations” (16). Television presents us with a visual representation of the news, or as Postman calls it, a “conversation in images” (7). This type of news leads to fragmentation and with fragmentation comes dissonance (cultural, political, social, etc.). I think it’s also important to address his notion that the form in which an idea is “conveyed” is inextricably linked to the truth that it illuminates. Postman writes that written words endures while the spoken vanishes. The tangibility of print seems to raise the ideas to a higher level of esteem whereas television is a mixture of images and speech (both fleeting; neither concrete). Postman, however, is not unreasonable in his conclusions. He does not completely condemn television; he even writes that television (in its brief existence) has in no way “matched printing’s output of junk.” Both mediums have the ability to create trivial nonsense, but Postman sees the danger in having truth (or news) that looks a little too much like entertainment.
After reading the first three chapters of Amusing Ourselves to Death, I would say that the major premise of the book is that information is displayed in the form of entertainment and that people lack the ability to attain information unless it is portrayed this way. In the first chapter, Postman talks about Reverend Graham and how he assured the audience that God loves those who make people laugh. (5). Right from the page 5, Postman is showing how people are attracted to humor. In my opinion, the very first sentence in chapter 2 explains what the book is going to be about. Postman states, “It is my intention in this book to show that a great media metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense. Postman does not discourage what he claims to be the “junk” that television displays, however he is noting the difference between the time period he is writing from and from the days of the printing press. Postman states, “I am arguing that a television-based epistemology pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape, not that it pollutes everything.” (28). It is crazy to see how right Postman was back when he wrote the book, and how what he claims in the first 3 chapters is still what is happening in today’s media world. Postman’s views are similar to what we were talking about in class-how all news media is displayed in the form of entertainment. People need the entertainment to attain information, whether it is comedy news shows such as The Colbert Report, or the fun flashy music at the beginning of Fox News.
I think Postman is trying to argue that the nature of television is completely transforming the kind of news we produce, read, and are interested in. He points out that on television "discourse is conducted largerly through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. (7)" Postman also highlights the rise of the image-manager and the decline of the speech-writer. Because television provides viewers with images and not words, we tend to focus more on what images are being presented rather than the words that are being spoken (7). Television then, is not a medium conducive to intelligent and thoughtful political or informational communication. Even Nixon knew that television had transformed the political arena. He advised Edward Kennedy to lose 20 pounds if he wanted to make a run for the presidency. He knew that Kennedy's weight would be an issue if he were to debate another candidate on television (4). Postman also argues that a new medium creates "new forms of truth-telling (27)". He tells a story of a grad student who uses a conversation between an investigator and a witness as a source for his doctoral oral. He tries to defend his source but quickly gets shutdown by the oral examiners. They point out that "in the academic world, the published word is invested with greater prestige and authenticity than the spoken word. The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors.(21)" I agree with Postman's argument. He clearly illustrates how and why television-based media is changing our discourse for the worse. It is a well-known fact that television producers will produce news that is tantalizing and exciting rather than news that has basis in the truth. I think this disregard for the truth in television has also permeated through into writing. I think this is essentially what Postman was trying to warn us against-"I will try to demonstrate that as typography moves to the periphery of our culture and television takes its place at the center, the seriousness, clarity and, above all, value of public discourse dangerously declines.(29)"
After I finished the reading (in the wee hours of the morning) I had just enough waking mental energy to jot down what I thought the premise of this book is. I think, and I get this mostly from Chapter 2, that Postman simply wants to explore the transitions our knowledge outlets have taken and then later explore the major implications and results of a television/technology saturated culture. I think something really important to acknowledge is on pages 22-23 when Postman writes, “…the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and has never, come unadorned…’truth’ is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.” I think this may be one of the most telling quotes in the first section because I think it’s Postman’s way acknowledging that it’s certainly ok for knowledge outlets and truths to vary culture to culture. He could have easily written a book that slams television and the constant stream of fluffy, irrelevant content, but he didn’t. His book seems to set out to tackle the overreaching effects of television as it’s sprung from its historical print-version ancestors. Obviously there are areas of criticism that were and will be acknowledged, but Postman is obviously trying to examine the whole sphere of television, it’s historical emergence, it’s cultural appeal and the cultural advantages and disadvantages it presents.
I have so far found this reading to be very interesting, especially as it pertains to me and the way I interact with the media. As a child, I did not watch television because I did not have cable. It was not until my more recent college years that television has been a part of my life, and even now I am so out of the habit of watching it that I most of the time I don’t. I do believe that this has had a positive effect on my upbringing, but I do not agree with everything that Postman has said so far in the first three chapters. In the first chapter, he discusses a world filled with superfluous information brought to us by overly manicured talking heads who most often care more about their own celebrity than they do the “news” they are supposed to be reporting. This I completely agree with and although it was not an entirely new idea for me, I was still disturbed by the reminder that even the most intelligent and forthright politicians do not stand a chance at elected office if they are not “attractive” by conventional standards. I would not agree, however, that printed word is always a better option television. As an auditory learner, I sometimes have to read textbooks many times before I feel fully prepared for a test, whereas I often times can listen to an engaging lecture once and feel like I have retained most of the information. In this way, a television can be powerful learning tool if used properly, and not just as a way of amusing ourselves while stranded in small hotel rooms with nothing else to do. The evolution of how we receive information and how that process intern effects us is scary, especially after reading the examples that Postman gives in chapter 3. To be able to read and understand and to be able to watch t.v. and understand are two very different things. It would be entirely possible for an uneducated person to watch television and make sense of it. This was of receiving information does not require the same level of thought or education that reading a piece of literature does. Because of this, it is imperative that the printed word remain as a primary source of learning. I believe that this is the major premise for Postman’s book and so far I would have to say that I agree with him.
Postman compares today’s outlook on news to how it was back in the day. He wants people to open their eyes to how the media is affecting everyday culture, especially with the growth of media outlets such as television. One interesting thing that he brought up was how everyone is into the spectacle of the news, but not the actual news itself. He describes the media as an “epistemology.” He says no matter what new form of technology nothing can take away from the newspapers and speech. In chapter two, Postman notes how the power of speech was a large influence. Postman mentioned in chapter two how the power of truth is evolving and the multiple complex truths will touch upon people differently. Communication is changing, and the spread of ideas, knowledge and truth is evolving. Another thing that I found interested in the reading was when he compared writers such as Charles Dickens to television stars. It was a real eye opener!
Postman writes that his intention with the book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” is to demonstrate that “a great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.” Public discourse now lacks seriousness, clarity and value, he writes, largely as a result of shifting from a print-based to a pictue-based media format. Postman is saying that “our notions of truth and our ideas of intelligence have changed as a result of new media displacing the old.”
I agree with him. Most of our culture today is 1984, Brave New World and Idiocracy rolled into one.
I completely understand what the author means when he writes that we are losing our attention spans, that we can no longer formulate a rational, coherent, chronological argument, and that a lot of it has to do with the decline of reading and the rise of watching. I think we are losing our imaginations. I think we are all attention-deficit. And I definitely agree that we spend a great deal of time talking about subjects of no real concern to us with no real knowledge about them.
Writing was never about getting rich. Television is. When our public discourse is secretly shaped by a focus on making money, which means boosting getting ratings, and expanding corporate power and influence, the public, as well as the politicians, are no longer discussing what is important. We start talking about what is irrelevant.
What I've gotten out of the first few chapters so far is that Postman believes that as culture shifts through different stages of media development so does it's ideas of truth. In chapter two he states "I must, first, demonstrate how, under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now - generally coherent, serious and rational; and then how, under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd." This is something I find hard not to agree with when taking a look at what was considered important news in both times. I somehow doubt a celebrity pregnancy would have garnered as much attention during Gutenberg's time as it does today (sorry Snooki). Postman claims we have become "sillier" and are best reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in our amusement by nearly anything placed infront of us on a screen. Our advancement in media technology has allowed our media content to become lazy and trivial since our tools for conversation rely mainly through television and internet.
I do not find myself in argument with Postman's books so far. In fact, I find most, if not all of his ideas to be very interesting and refreshing. I like that as I read, I get the feeling of a man who really knows his stuff, as his makes references to past events and statements made by past presidents, etc, to help us understand, better yet, believe in the points he makes. For one, we ourselves, the readers or "culture watchers and worriers," can see how "corporate conversations" continues to shape our society... for the worst. I agree with Postman that we are "amusing ourselves to death."
I thought is was really interesting that Postman said political philosophy cannot be done on television because its form works against the content. This to me, is related to the premise of his book.
I like that he mentions how the U.S Constitution makes no note of it, but that it would appear that fat people are excluded from running for high political office. According to Postman, America has "reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control." I agree. I think this is relevant in today's presidential campaign.
He also mentions that even journalists are aware that those without camera appeal are excluded from presenting the public with the news. Why should it matter? Isn't what's going on in the world, our conditions as a nation far more important? I like that he sort of credits how far we've come with technology, that had it not been for this progression we wouldn't be able to attend to what is know as "the news of the day."
In the first three chapters of, "Amusing Ourselves to Death", Postman breaks down our history into basically three different periods: oral culture, written culture, and the technological/image culture that we are currently in right now. One of the most important points I picked up was the fact that over time from the telegraph to the television, the communication turned from topics with substance to more visuals and less important context. Another point that Postman discussed was the fact that image is vital in our society today. He gave an example that a three-hundred-pound man would never be put forth to run our country as President. It blows my mind how narrow minded our world is today that in order to be successful you need to be "good looking" or be able to entertain. Postman was aware that the way we receive information is changing with the times. I completely agree with Postman in the fact that he is trying to get us to understand the dangers that TV poses to us and our intelligence.
I believe that Postman's premise of "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is that human beings have lost the inability to learn unless they are being amused in the process. I also think his premise rests on the relationship between the medium of communication and its influence on culture. I agree with his claim that "we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant." Television has always been a mirror of what society values and cherishes and that shows in not what television produces but how society is affected by these products.
The major premise of Postman's book is that mediums of communication are not tantamount or transferable to each other; rather, the medium dictates the message. Postman uses the 2nd commandment of the Decalogue to illustrate this point, in which God dictates that “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." Postman argues that this commandment was in place because idolatry is a medium too literal to convey the abstractness and omnipotence of God. If the Israelites changed the medium through which they interpreted the concept of God, the concept would change. As a broader example, he references the anthropological maxim that a culture's language dictates how they view the world. Differences between various forms of spoken word dictate how different cultures view the world. However, these forms of communication are all language-based. It therefore makes a great deal of sense to me that the void between the way a language-based society views the world and the way a visually-based society (our own) views the world would be even wider than the difference between distinct language-based cultures.
I believe that languages are so different that literary translations are bunk, even if you were translating one Indo-European language to another. I once (attempted) to read some works of Isaac Babel that had been translated in a way that attempted to convey the imagery and concepts of the works with as little alteration as possible. I might as well have been staring at a bowl of Alphabits.
Postman believes that the medium dictates the philosophy of content, and I couldn't agree more.
I think the major premise of Amusing Ourselves to Death is the effect of both the rise and fall of the printed press on public discourse , and of the ways in which we as a society have re-routed the medium of our intake of information.
This idea was very apparent in Postman's discussion of the Second Commandment, when he explicated the reasoning behind God's specific instructions about the right and wrong way to symbolize the human experience. Here, Postman states that an explanation of this commandment is that "its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture" (Postman 9). In Postman's view, the way in which a culture communicates its views is very directly connected to the condition of the culture itself. Postman also implies that the shift from image-centered to word-centered thinking made the progress that we have made possible. He also expresses concern about the modern shift back-- away from words (ie the printed word) and back to images (movies, television, etc).
One point where I found myself disagreeing with Postman was in his discussion of television that attempts to be "high brow." Postman believes that when television "presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations," it is most dangerous (16). I think that intelligent and informative television can be beneficial to society. I think Postman's concern is that this kind of television is attempting to cover up the fact that the media is feeding us bullshit, and sees "smart" television as a mere mask to prevent viewers from realizing that these shows are espousing misleading information. Postman further discusses this idea when he refutes the idea that "the form in which an idea is being conveyed is irrelevant to its truth" (21). As the author illustrates, content and form are very much connected, and one should always consider the medium through which they received information when evaluating this information's validity.
I also really appreciated Postman's bluntness when he said that as a result of our shift from print-based epistemology to television-based epistemology, "we are getting sillier by the minute" (24). Because of the difference between the way information is communicated and processed through print and television, we as a society are questioning what we are told less and less. Instead, we tend to rely on what has been syndicated and approved for our view on the idiot box.
So far, I find myself agreeing with a lot of Postman's views on how connected ones worldview is with the medium through which they've received the information that shaped that worldview. His ideas about the way the development of language, and then print, spurred the onset of symbol-based thinking changed humanity's perceptions of the world seem spot on to me, and will definitely make me consider the source of my information when judging the truthfulness of my knowledge and the validity of my opinions.
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