|
e0278de
|
The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations. The irony here is that this is ..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
1dd0c9d
|
How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
1128186
|
As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
6b4a5b6
|
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about crime will do it..
|
|
news
media
|
Neil Postman |
|
773aded
|
The world of the known and the not yet known is bridged by wonderment. But wonderment happens largely in a situation where the child's world is separate from the adult world, where children must seek entry, through their questions, into the adult world. As media merge the two worlds, as the tension created by secrets to be unraveled is diminished, the calculus of wonderment changes. Curiosity is replaced by cynicism or, even worse, arroganc..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
4073bfd
|
Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.
|
|
image-centered-culture
typographic-mind
word-centered-culture
|
Neil Postman |
|
67318a6
|
you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes your bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an "immunity to eloquence," 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 their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author's attitude t..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
b39b3d4
|
It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
c7486f2
|
there is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
89b41a4
|
a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodat..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
56d42f6
|
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.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
b441bbd
|
belief that where there is a problem, there must be a solution, I shall conclude with the following suggestions. We must, as a start, not delude ourselves with preposterous notions such as the straight Luddite position as outlined, for example, in Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Americans will not shut down any part of their technological apparatus, and to suggest that they do so is to make no suggestion at ..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
7ce62fe
|
There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first--the Orwellian--culture becomes a prison. In the second--the Huxleyan--culture becomes a burlesque. No
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
e0bfb29
|
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.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
7678e24
|
The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
6b945d3
|
Terrence Moran, "yapisi geregi imaji ve parcayi guclendirmeye yatkin olan medyayla tarihsel bir perspektif edinemeyiz" derken tam hedefi vurmaktadir. Moran'a gore kalicilik ve bir baglam olmayinca "elde bulunan bilgi parcalari mantikli ve tutarli bir butun olusturacak sekilde birlestirilemez." Hatirlamayi reddetmedigimiz gibi, hatirlamayi tamamen yararsiz buluyor da degiliz. Onun yerine, hatirlamaya uygun varliklar olmaktan cikariliyoruz. C..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
ed8425f
|
The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales,
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
33bdd16
|
With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by priv..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
b8c86a6
|
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.
|
|
intelligence
print
public-discourse
rational-thought
|
Neil Postman |
|
c3010ee
|
Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean "ecological" in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpi..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
acffbd6
|
The modern idea of testing a reader's "comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending?"
|
|
reading
|
Neil Postman |
|
41ca505
|
Many decisions about the form and content of news programs are made on the basis of information about the viewer, the purpose of which is to keep the viewers watching so that they will be exposed to the commercials
|
|
television
|
Neil Postman |
|
94236c7
|
the world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
fc55b86
|
Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged ..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
3955947
|
Technopoly is to say that its information immune system is inoperable. Technopoly is a form of cultural AIDS, which I here use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome. This is why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words "A study has shown ..." or "Scientists now tell us that ..." More important, it is why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
4df6677
|
Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved. In
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
ae06fb7
|
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."
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
0e7c7e4
|
Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention suc..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
e57bdfb
|
As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
9950e2c
|
We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.
|
|
|
neil postman |
|
3868b45
|
I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words "The computer shows ..." or "The computer has determined ..." It is Technopoly's equivalent of the sentence "It is God's will," and the effect is roughly the same."
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
b59c45e
|
Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
eb9d235
|
I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying. As
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
b49e03a
|
We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years."4"
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
7086b34
|
We may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
34d03dd
|
What's wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technologies
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
4631a03
|
Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
132ef27
|
One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
ec2fe8c
|
In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
6246575
|
the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
d464b4b
|
Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to produce that; if students are too demoralized, bored, or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then THAT is the educational problem which has to be solved. . . That problem . . . is metaphysical in nature, not technical
|
|
self-directed-learning
|
Neil Postman |
|
c8c7473
|
Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
92f8493
|
Wenn wir weiterhin die Wissenschaft oder die Heilige Schrift so lesen, als gaben sie uns die Wahrheit direkt und definitiv, dann werden alle darin enthaltenen Hoffnungen und Versprechen zu Staub. Eine als universelle Wahrheit, nicht als menschliche Erzahlung gelesene Wissenschaft degeneriert zu technologischer Sklaverei. Eine als universelle Wahrheit, nicht als menschliche Erzahlung gelesene Heilige Schrift degeneriert zu... was? Zu Inquisi..
|
|
|
Neil Postman |
|
4187020
|
Ich meine damit eine Geschichte. Aber nicht irgendeine Geschichte. Ich denke an grosse Erzahlungen - Erzahlungen, die tief und komplex genug sind, um Erklarungen hinsichtlich der Herkunft und der Zukunft eines Volkes zu bieten; Erzahlungen, die Ideale aufstellen, Verhaltungsregeln vorgeben, die Quellen von Autoritat benennen und durch all dies eine Dimension von Kontinuitat und Sinnhaftigkeit erzeugen.
|
|
|
Neil Postman |