Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business Part 2 Chapter 11 Summary | Course Hero

July 5, 2024, 12:57 pm

Postman calls his final chapter a "warning, " but he emphasizes that he does not know the full extent of the threat. A photographer, Postman suggests, can only portray objects. Rabbi Hillel told us: "What is hateful to thee, do not do to another. " As new technology develops, they will have to analyze and imagine even more. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Nonetheless, everyone has an opinion about the events he is "informed" about, but it is probably more accurate to call it emotions rather than opinions). Postman has already told us that we are becoming a society obsessed and oppressed by trivia, just like the characters of Huxley's Brave New World. To whom are you hoping to give power?

What is one reason postman believes television is a mythique
What is one reason postman believes television is a myth
What is one reason postman believes television is a myth in current culture

What Is One Reason Postman Believes Television Is A Mythique

One of the problems that you may have noticed with machines is that they are designed with convenience in mind. But the telegraph also destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. What is one reason postman believes television is a myth. What is happening here is that TV is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation.

Today we are inclined to express and accept truth only in the form of numbers, but why don't we use proverbs and parables, like the old Greeks? Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. What is one reason Postman believes television is a myth in current culture. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. Today, we are inheritors of Socrates' and Plato's charges, and one of the worst things a public speaker can be charged with is of uttering "empty rhetoric. " For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. Make the context disappear, or fragment it, and contradiction disappears.

In other words, knows something about the costs of great technologies. The point Postman is leading to is that as a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it. For now, perhaps, it does not matter. Moreover, he concedes that enough junk "to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing" has been created through print media. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Television, or more specifically, the commercialized American manifestation of television, is a medium of communication that pollutes the ebb and flow of serious discourse. Another factor for the attractiveness of a programme is its brevity that makes coherence impossible. As Postman states: It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. Today we must look to the city of Las Vegas in order to learn more about America´s national character: 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. What is one reason postman believes television is a myth in current culture. "Every television program must be a complete package in itself. Some gain, some lose, a few remain as they were.

Americans revere these dissidents because they are familiar with the enemy they oppose. By ushering in the world of the "Age of Television", America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future. What is one reason postman believes television is a mythique. He takes us into modern (80s) America, and charts the historical and social developments that have taken us to the point in which a failed movie star was sitting President. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse. Television educates by teaching children to do what television-viewing requires of them. He will think it ridiculous because he assumes you are proposing that something in nature be changed; as if you are suggesting that the sun should rise at 10 AM instead of at 6. Printing gave us the modern conception of nationhood, but in so doing turned patriotism into a sordid if not lethal emotion.

What Is One Reason Postman Believes Television Is A Myth

But one cannot refute it. Just as the television commercial empties itself of authentic product information so that it can do its psychological work, image politics empties itself of authentic political substance for the same reason. Socrates told us: "The unexamined life is not worth living. " What all of this means is that our culture has moved towards a new way of conducting its business. These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. Thoughts and questions must be held in the mind the whole time. Show business is not entirely without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. To what degree, however, Postman asks his readers, was the information that Baltimore was feeding Washington? The point here is to understand what does "myth" mean to Barthes. Postman, Neil - Amusing Ourselves to Death - GRIN. Why is this a problem?

He looks to the alphabet and printing press as examples. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpatual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a comedy show, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture death is a clear possibility. TV has become the paradigm for our conception of public information and has achieved the power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also defined how we shall respond to it. The second idea was photography, spoken of as a "language".

"Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration". MacNeil tells us that the idea of the news presentation. Some argue TV helps choosing the best man over party. Today, we have less to fear from government restraints than from TV glut. And, of course, which groups of people will thereby be harmed? For example, banning a book in Long Island is merely trivial, whereas TV clearly does impair one's freedom to read, and it does so with innocent hands.

Telegraphy made relevance irrelevant; the abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed. The second conclusion is that this fact has more to do with the bias of TV than with the deficiencies of these "electronic preachers". The immigrants who came to settle in New England were dedicated and skilful readers whose religious sensibilities, political ideas and social life were embedded in the medium of typography. Does writing always succeed? Public business was expressed through print, which became the model, the metaphor and the measure of all discourse. Americans often picture the frightening "machinery of thought-control" as a foe coming from outside, not from within. To demythologize media means thinking of media as a part of history, not a part of nature. The problems come when we try to live in them" (77). It is also well to recall that for all of the intellectual and social benefits provided by the printing press, its costs were equally monumental. And television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, with a dangerous perfection.

What Is One Reason Postman Believes Television Is A Myth In Current Culture

To the modern mind it would appear irrelevant, even childish. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing.... We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. By that time, Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books. But this should not be taken to mean that they do not have practical consequences.

Indeed, in certain fields, it is the medium of mathematics that will only carry weight in a conversation. The printing press gave the Western world prose, but it made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of communication. The main characteristics of TV are that it offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification. We have entered the Information Age, but time will tell if Amusement might be a better moniker. Here is what Goethe told us: "One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words. "

Glasses being invented in the 12th century confirmed the shift from ear to eye as our main sense. These questions should certainly be on our minds when we think about computer technology. Since then, these traits have only become magnified with new mediums and new technologies. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound, sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. Just as the clock has the ability to transform culture, so too has the television the onus of causing a myriad of cultural shifts. The television commercial has been the chief instrument in creating the modern methods of presenting political ideas. Advertising was expected to convey information and intended to appeal understanding, not passions. As critics of Postman, it is important for us to perhaps concede that exposition is a notable and worthwhile practice, but we might do well to question some of the typographic examples he provides us with. It has all the qualities of a good soap: action, drama, cliffhanger, and beautiful people. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. If, as is the case, different languages entail different views of the world, one can imagine the consequences of every introduction of a new medium: culture is recreated anew by every medium of conversation.

The "Daily News" gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action because it is both abstract and remote. There is no doubt that the computer has been and will continue to be advantageous to large-scale organizations like the military or airline companies or banks or tax collecting institutions. The telegraphic person values speed, not introspection. Chapter 7, "Now... this".