Monday, June 29, 2009
What Horrors Await Us in the Future?
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman gives the impression that he has no hope in a society influenced by television. It seems like he's mourning the gradual extinction of typography as a medium for public discourse. In the first chapter, Postman acknowledges the fact that television has taken over as the dominant media and that the printed word is relied on less and less. In the second chapter of the book, he points out the fact that people's perception of the truth is largely based on the method in which it is conveyed. He stresses that the shift in media altars our sense of truth and judgement. So with that in mind, is it safe to assume that humanity is mentally moving down the evolutionary chain by making advances in the fields of technology? Postman has made it evident that we're relying too much on television, but that doesn't seem to concern people (seeing as nothing's changed in the past few decades). I'm not that far in the book, but from what I can tell, Postman fears for a future without literature.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I strongly disagree with the 'nothing's changed in the past few decades' part. Many things have changed from what we think is important (yes he's the king of pop but who's freaking out over that Iranian girl who got her head blasted off?) to the frenzy we go in when we feel something affects us, immediately that is (that flu that's going around? oh yea that's really more than child pornography, obesity, and nuclear bombs). Television changed the way we think. It's fast, which is the way we want and expect everything to be now- computers, technology, news, even our food. The only reason it appears that we don't care is because, frankly we don't. Television is kind of like our soma.
ReplyDeleteI read Rianna's comment that nothing has changed as meaning that since Postman wrote this book in 1985, we have not loosened our grip on television -- if anything, as you suggest, our relationship with the screen has become more integral to the way we think and process information. You two are actually in agreement.
ReplyDelete