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The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors.
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Neil Postman |
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7abed2e
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although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication--from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.
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Neil Postman |
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b79683b
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Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies."
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Neil Postman |
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c67890d
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if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis--a theory, a vision, a metaphor--something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
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Neil Postman |
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13a5327
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But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, w..
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Neil Postman |
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c516d07
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Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.
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Neil Postman |
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bc678e1
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Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such co..
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Neil Postman |
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9b7a580
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As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
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Neil Postman |
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e436ee9
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Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speed than ever before, To the question "What problem does the information solve?" the answer is usually "How to generate, store and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before." This i..
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solutions-in-search-of-problems
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Neil Postman |
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91c3998
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Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.
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Neil Postman |
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076e199
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An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate.
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Neil Postman |
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8dadcb5
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Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages in-sensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.
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Neil Postman |
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43adec6
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computer technology functions more as a new mode of transportation than as a new means of substantive communication. It moves information--lots of it, fast, and mostly in a calculating mode. The computer, in fact, makes possible the fulfillment of Descartes' dream of the mathematization of the world. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful (as when the ..
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Neil Postman |
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5897fa7
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We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.
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Neil Postman |
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a0df4b6
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on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln's turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. 1 The audience..
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Neil Postman |
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f8bb9d6
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The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV).
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Neil Postman |
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3e14d5c
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Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong.
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Neil Postman |
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6035caf
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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.
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Neil Postman |
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e9642ba
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Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.
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Neil Postman |
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133f4f9
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But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.
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Neil Postman |
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b2bb5fa
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Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is demanded of you as you 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 undiscip..
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Neil Postman |
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d61fdce
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Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the 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 thought stupid.
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Neil Postman |
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bec5e26
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What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, bu..
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Neil Postman |
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d692528
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A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
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Neil Postman |
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d01de80
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As technical people, we are apt to be preoccupied with scores, not competence...
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Neil Postman |
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02b9855
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The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
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Neil Postman |