Monday, July 13, 2009
Past or Present
In Chapter Four of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman discusses the impact of the printed word on America between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. Back then, the printed word was the ultimate medium (or as Postman called it, the metaphor) of all public discourse. The printed word was relied on for all sources of information, be it the newspaper or books, and people actually looked forward to things like lecture night at the local town lecture hall or the release of the newest novel. Postman believes that because our society had been shaped by the printed word, America's founding fathers were great intellectuals (which he apparently thought to be "a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations"). It seems that he's praising society as it was a couple centuries ago because of our love and willingness to read. He also keeps bringing up how far we have strayed from the Age of Typography. With that in mind, is he implying that America would have been better off without television and all those other "distractions"? Are we actually one step backward from where we were in the past?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I do think that Postman is implying that we would be better off without all these “distractions.” Back then people could sit through lectures that lasted for several hours and relied on books with words not a television screen, radios, or pictures. Postman says, “Is there any audience of Americans today who could endure seven hours of talk?” I know I couldn’t and I don’t know too many people that could or would want to like these people did back then.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think the production of new technology is taking us “one step backward from where we were in the past,” but I don’t think it is putting us a step ahead either. People use television and think they are gaining information from it when all that is being done is that the show is just simply being watched. An example of this would be in chapter ten, “Teaching as an Amusing Activity.” After a study was done “stern reported that 51 percent of viewers could not recall a single item of news a few minutes after viewing a news program on television” (152).