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Everything In Our Background Has Prepared Us To Know And Resist A Prison When The Gates Begin To Close Around Us . . . But What If There Are No Cries Of Anguish To Be Heard? Who Is Prepared To Take Arms Against A Sea Of Amusements? To Whom Do We Complain, And When, And In What Tone Of Voice, When Serious Discourse Dissolves Into Giggles? What Is The Antidote To A Culture's Being Drained By Laughter?

-Neil Postman

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Everything In Our Background

Neil Postman

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Everything In Our Background Has Prepared Us To Know And Resist A Prison When The Gates Begin To Close Around Us . . . But What If There Are No Cries Of Anguish To Be Heard? Who Is Prepared To Take Arms Against A Sea Of Amusements? To Whom Do We Complain, And When, And In What Tone Of Voice, When Serious Discourse Dissolves Into Giggles? What Is The Antidote To A Culture's Being Drained By Laughter?

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You Cannot Avoid Making Judgements But You Can Become More Conscious Of The Way In Which You Make Them. This Is Critically Important Because Once We Judge Someone Or Something We Tend To Stop Thinking About Them Or It.

At Its Best, Schooling Can Be About How To Make A Life, Which Is Quite Different From How To Make A Living.

Watching Television Requires No Skills And Develops No Skills. That Is Why There Is No Such Thing As Remedial Television-watching.

Television Watching

If We May Say That The Age Of Andrew Jackson Took Political Life Out Of The Hands Of Aristocrats And Turned It Over To The Masses, Then We May Say, With Equal Justification, That The Age Of Television Has Taken Politics Away From The Adult Mind Altogether.

If Students Get A Sound Education In The History, Social Effects And Psychological Biases Of Technology, They May Grow To Be Adults Who Use Technology Rather Than Be Used By It.

The Key To All Fanatical Beliefs Is That They Are Self-confirming....(some Beliefs Are) Fanatical Not Because They Are "false", But Because They Are Expressed In Such A Way That They Can Never Be Shown To Be False.

Television Is A Non Graded Curriculum And Excludes No Viewer For Any Reason, At Any Time. In Other Words, In Doing Away Wtih The Idea Of Sequenece And Continuity In Education, Television Undermines The Idea That Sequence And Continuity Have Anything To Do With Thought Itself.

Cyberspace' Is A Metaphorical Idea Which Is Supposed To Be The Space Where Your Consciousness Is Located When You're Using Computer Technology On The Internet, For Example, And I'm Not Entirely Sure It's Such A Useful Term, But I Think That's What Most People Mean By It.

[it] Is Not That Television Is Entertaining But That It Has Made Entertainment Itself The Natural Format For The Representation Of All Experience. […] The Problem Is Not That Television Presents Us With Entertaining Subject Matter But That All Subject Matter Is Presented As Entertaining. (87)

What The Advertiser Needs To Know Is Not What Is Right About The Product But What Is Wrong About The Buyer.

. . . Americans Are The Best Entertained And Quite Likely The Least Well-informed People In The Western World.

The Price Of Maintaining Membership In The Establishment Is Unquestioning Acceptance Of Authority.

Because He Did Not Have Time To Read Every New Book In His Field, The Great Polish Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski Used A Simple And Efficient Method Of Deciding Which Ones Were Worth His Attention: Upon Receiving A New Book, He Immediately Checked The Index To See If His Name Was Cited, And How Often. The More "malinowski" The More Compelling The Book. No "malinowski", And He Doubted The Subject Of The Book Was Anthropology At All.

There Is No Escaping From Ourselves. The Human Dilemma Is As It Has Always Been, And We Solve Nothing Fundamental By Cloaking Ourselves In Technological Glory.

Computers Are Merely Ingenious Devices To Fulfill Unimportant Functions. The Computer Revolution Is An Explosion Of Nonsense.

A Definition Is The Start Of An Argument, Not The End Of One.

People Of A Television Culture Need “plain Language” Both Aurally And Visually, And Will Even Go So Far As To Require It In Some Circumstances By Law. The Gettysburg Address Would Probably Have Been Largely Incomprehensible To A 1985 Audience.

We Do Not Measure A Culture By Its Output Of Undisguised Trivialities But By What It Claims As Significant.

We Can Make The Trains Run On Time But If They Are Not Going Where We Want Them To Go, Why Bother?

[m]ost Of Our Daily News Is Inert, Consisting Of Information That Gives Us Something To Talk About But Cannot Lead To Any Meaningful Action. (68).

The Point Is That Profound But Contradictory Ideas May Exist Side By Side, If They Are Constructed From Different Materials And Methods. And Have Different Purposes. Each Tells Us Something Important About Where We Stand In The Universe, And It Is Foolish To Insist That They Must Despise Each Other.

We Are More Naive Than Those Of The Middle Ages, And More Frightened, For We Can Be Made To Believe Almost Anything.

Once You Have Learned To Ask Questions - Relevant And Appropriate And Substantial Questions - You Have Learned How To Learn And No One Can Keep You From Learning Whatever You Want Or Need To Know.

When A Population Becomes Distracted By Trivia, When Cultural Life Is Redefined As A Perpetual 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 Vaudeville Act, Then A Nation Finds Itself At Risk; Culture-death Is A Clear Possibility.

The Written Word Endures, The Spoken Word Disappears

I Don't Think Any Of Us Can Do Much About The Rapid Growth Of New Technology. A New Technology Helps To Fuel The Economy, And Any Discussion Of Slowing Its Growth Has To Take Account Of Economic Consequences. However, It Is Possible For Us To Learn How To Control Our Own Uses Of Technology.

Voting, We Might Even Say, Is The Next To Last Refuge Of The Politically Impotent. The Last Refuge Is, Of Course, Giving Your Opinion To A Pollster, Who Will Get A Version Of It Through A Desiccated Question, And Then Will Submerge It In A Niagara Of Similar Opinions, And Convert Them Into--what Else?--another Piece Of News. Thus We Have Here A Great Loop Of Impotence: The News Elicits From You A Variety Of Opinions About Which You Can Do Nothing Except To Offer Them As More News, About Which You Can Do Nothing.

The Idea Of Taking What People Call The 'entertainment Culture' As A Focus Of Study, Including Historical Perspective, Is Not A Bad Idea.

The Effects Of Technology Are Always Unpredictable. But They Are Not Always Inevitable.

A Metaphor Is Not An Ornament. It Is An Organ Of Perception. Through Metaphors, We See The World As One Thing Or Another.

I Do Not Mean To Imply That Television News Deliberately Aims To Deprive Americans Of A Coherent, Contextual Understanding Of Their World. I Mean To Say That When News Is Packaged As Entertainment, That Is The Inevitable Result. And In Saying That The Television News Show Entertains But Does Not Inform, I Am Saying Something Far More Serious Than That We Are Being Deprived Of Authentic Information. I Am Saying We Are Losing Our Sense Of What It Means To Be Well Informed.

The Scientific Method," Thomas Henry Huxley Once Wrote, "is Nothing But The Normal Working Of The Human Mind." That Is To Say, When The Mind Is Working; That Is To Say Further, When It Is Engaged In Correcting Its Mistakes. Taking This Point Of View, We May Conclude That Science Is Not Physics, Biology, Or Chemistry — Is Not Even A ”subject " — But A Moral Imperative Drawn From A Larger Narrative Whose Purpose Is To Give Perspective, Balance, And Humility To Learning.

You Can Only Photograph A Fragment Of The Here And Now. The Photograph Presents The World As Object; Language, The World As Idea.

Television Screens Saturated With Commercials Promote The Utopian And Childish Idea That All Problems Have Fast, Simple, And Technological Solutions. You Must Banish From Your Mind The Naive But Commonplace Notion That Commercials Are About Products. They Are About Products In The Same Sense That The Story Of Jonah Is About The Anatomy Of Whales.

Anyone Who Has Studied The History Of Technology Knows That Technological Change Is Always A Faustian Bargain: Technology Giveth And Technology Taketh Away, And Not Always In Equal Measure. A New Technology Sometimes Creates More Than It Destroys. Sometimes, It Destroys More Than It Creates. But It Is Never One-sided. The Invention Of The Printing Press Is An Excellent Example. Printing Fostered The Modern Idea Of Individuality But It Destroyed The Medieval Sense Of Community And Social Integration.

Technological Change

It Is Inescapable That Every Culture Must Negotiate With Technology, Whether It Does So Intelligently Or Not. A Bargain Is Struck In Which Technology Giveth And Technology Taketh Away.

But It Is Much Later In The Game Now, And Ignorance Of The Score Is Inexcusable. To Be Unaware That A Technology Comes Equipped With A Program For Social Change, To Maintain That Technology Is Neutral, To Make The Assumption That Technology Is Always A Friend To Culture Is, At This Late Hour, Stupidity Plain And Simple.

School Has Never Really Been About Individualized Learning, But About How To Be Socialized As A Citizen And As A Human Being, So That We, We Have Important Rules In School, Always Emphasizing The Fact That One Is Part Of A Group.

There Is No Way To Help A Learner To Be Disciplined, Active, And Thoroughly Engaged Unless He Perceives A Problem To Be A Problem Or Whatever Is To-be-learned As Worth Learning, And Unless He Plays An Active Role In Determining The Process Of Solution.

Our Priests And Presidents, Our Surgeons And Lawyers, Our Educators And Newscasters Need Worry Less About Satisfying The Demands Of Their Discipline Than The Demands Of Good Showmanship.

By Itself Photography Cannot Deal With The Unseen, The Remote, The Internal, The Abstract, It Does Not Speak Of Man, Only Of A Man ; Not Of Tree, Only A Tree.

It Is A Mistake To Suppose That Any Technological Innovation Has A One-sided Effect. Every Technology Is Both A Burden And A Blessing; Not Either-or, But This-and-that.

My Argument Is Limited To Saying That A Major New Medium Changes The Structure Of Discourse; It Does So By Encouraging Certain Uses Of The Intellect, By Favoring Certain Definitions Of Intelligence And Wisdom, And By Demanding A Certain Kind Of Content - In A Phrase, By Creating New Forms Of Truth-telling.

I Mean To Suggest That Without A Transcendent And Honorable Purpose, Schooling Must Reach Its Finish, And The Sooner We Are Done With It, The Better.

America Was Founded By Intellectuals, A Rare Occurrence In The History Of Modern Nations We Might Even Say That America Was Founded By Intellectuals, From Which It Has Taken Us Two Centuries And A Communications Revolution To Recover.

People In Distress Will Sometimes Prefer A Problem That Is Familiar To A Solution That Is Not.

Our Politics, Religion, News, Athletics, Education And Commerce Have Been Transformed Into Congenial Adjuncts Of Show Business, Largely Without Protest Or Even Much Popular Notice. The Result Is That We Are A People On The Verge Of Amusing Ourselves To Death.

Printing Links The Present With Forever. It Carries Personal Identity Into Realms Unknown.

Reading Is The Scourge Of Childhood Because, In A Sense, It Creates Adulthood.

I Am Not A Luddite. I Am Suspicious Of Technology. I Am Perfectly Aware Of Its Benefits, But I Also Try To Pay Attention To Some Of The Negative Effects.

For In The End, He Was Trying To Tell Us What Afflicted The People In 'brave New World' Was Not That They Were Laughing Instead Of Thinking, But That They Did Not Know What They Were Laughing About And Why They Had Stopped Thinking.

Brave New World

It Is Not Necessary To Conceal Anything From A Public Insensible To Contradiction And Narcotized By Technological Diversions.

The Past Is Strapped To Our Backs. We Do Not Have To See It; We Can Always Feel It. People Gather Bundles Of Sticks To Build Bridges They Never Cross. People In Distress Will Sometimes Prefer A Problem That Is Familiar To A Solution That Is Not.

The Making Of Adaptable, Curious, Open, Questioning People Has Nothing To Do With Vocational Training And Everything To Do With Humanistic And Scientific Studies.

Education Research: This Is A Process Whereby Serious Educators Discover Knowledge That Is Well Known To Everybody, And Has Been For Several Centuries. Its Principal Characteristic Is That No One Pays Any Attention To It.

In Russia, Writers With Serious Grievances Are Arrested, While In America They Are Merely Featured On Television Talk Shows, Where All That Is Arrested Is Their Development.

When Media Make War Against Each Other, It Is A Case Of World-views In Collision.

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.

As A Culture Moves From Orality To Writing To Printing To Televising, Its Ideas Of Truth Move With It.

The Reader Must Come Armed , In A Serious State Of Intellectual Readiness. This Is Not Easy Because He Comes To The Text Alone. In Reading, One's Responses Are Isolated, One'sintellect Thrown Back On Its Own Resourses. To Be Confronted By The Cold Abstractions Of Printed Sentences Is To Look Upon Language Bare, Without The Assistance Of Either Beauty Or Community. Thus, Reading Is By Its Nature A Serious Business. It Is Also, Of Course, An Essentially Rational Activity.

Voting Is The Next-to-last Refuge Of The Politically Impotent. The Last Refuge, Of Course, Is Giving Your Opinion To A Pollster.

Through The Computer, The Heralds Say, We Will Make Education Better, Religion Better, Politics Better, Our Minds Better — Best Of All, Ourselves Better. This Is, Of Course, Nonsense, And Only The Young Or The Ignorant Or The Foolish Could Believe It.

Everything In Our Background Has Prepared Us To Know And Resist A Prison When The Gates Begin To Close Around Us . . . But What If There Are No Cries Of Anguish To Be Heard? Who Is Prepared To Take Arms Against A Sea Of Amusements? To Whom Do We Complain, And When, And In What Tone Of Voice, When Serious Discourse Dissolves Into Giggles? What Is The Antidote To A Culture's Being Drained By Laughter?

But In The End, Science Does Not Provide The Answers Most Of Us Require. Its Story Of Our Origins And Of Our End Is, To Say The Least, Unsatisfactory. To The Question, "how Did It All Begin?", Science Answers, "probably By An Accident." To The Question, "how Will It All End?", Science Answers, "probably By An Accident." And To Many People, The Accidental Life Is Not Worth Living. Moreover, The Science-god Has No Answer To The Question, "why Are We Here?" And, To The Question, "what Moral Instructions Do You Give Us?", The Science-god Maintains Silence.

The Television Commercial Is Not At All About The Character Of Products To Be Consumed. It Is About The Character Of The Consumers Of Products. (128)

Television Commercials

Americans No Longer Talk To Each Other, They Entertain Each Other. They Do Not Exchange Ideas, They Exchange Images. They Do Not Argue With Propositions; They Argue With Good Looks, Celebrities And Comercials.

The Way In Which The Photograph Records Experience Is Also Different From The Way Of Language. Language Makes Sense Only When It Is Presented As A Sequence Of Propositions. Meaning Is Distorted When A Word Or Sentence Is, As We Say, Taken Out Of Context; When A Reader Or Listener Is Deprived Of What Was Said Before, And After. But There Is No Such Thing As A Photograph Taken Out Of Context, For A Photograph Does Not Require One. In Fact, The Point Of Photography Is To Isolate Images From Context, So As To Make Them Visible In A Different Way.

Technology Always Has Unforeseen Consequences, And It Is Not Always Clear, At The Beginning, Who Or What Will Win, And Who Or What Will Lose.

Tv Serves Us Most Usefully When Presenting Junk-entertainment; It Serves Us Most Ill When It Co-opts Serious Modes Of Discourse - News, Politics, Science, Education, Commerce, Religion.

A Book Is An Attempt To Make Through Permanent And To Contribute To The Great Conversation Conducted By Authors Of The Past. […] The Telegraph Is Suited Only To The Flashing Of Messages, Each To Be Quickly Replaced By A More Up-to-date Message. Facts Push Other Facts Into And Then Out Of Consciousness At Speeds That Neither Permit Nor Require Evaluation. (70)

Television Is Our Culture's Principal Mode Of Knowing About Itself. Therefore -- And This Is The Critical Point -- How Television Stages The World Becomes The Model For How The World Is Properly To Be Staged. It Is Not Merely That On The Television Screen Entertainment Is The Metaphor For All Discourse. It Is That Off The Screen The Same Metaphor Prevails. (92)

It Is Not Entirely True That A Tv Producer Or Reporter Has Complete Control Over The Contents Of Programs. The Interests And Inclinations Of The Audience Have As Much To Do With The What Is On Television As Do The Ideas Of The Producer And Reporter.

The Line-by-line, Sequential, Continuous Form Of The Printed Page Slowly Began To Lose Its Resonance As A Metaphor Of How Knowledge Was To Be Acquired And How The World Was To Be Understood. "knowing" The Facts Took On A New Meaning, For It Did Not Imply That One Understood Implications, Background, Or Connections. Telegraphic Discourse Permitted No Time For Historical Perspectives And Gave No Priority To The Qualitative. To The Telegraph, Intelligence Meant Knowing Of Lots Of Things, Not Knowing About Them.

Make No Mistake About It: The Labeling Of Someone's Language As 'sexist' Involves A Political Judgment And Implies The Desirability Of A Particular Sociological Doctrine. One May Be In Favor Of That Doctrine (as I Believe I Am) But It Is Quite Another Matter To Force Writers By Edicts And Censorship Into Accepting It.

Typography Fostered The Modern Idea Of Individuality, But It Destroyed The Medieval Sense Of Community And Integration.

If Parents Wish To Preserve Childhood For Their Own Children, They Must Conceive Of Parenting As An Act Of Rebellion Against Culture

Remember: In Order For A Perception To Change One Must Be Frustrated In One's Actions Or Change One's Purpose.

Public Schooling Does Not Serve A Public; It Creates A Pubic.

Build An "inclusive Narrative" That Goes Beyond Race, Class, Religion, Etc., So That All May Participate In The "the Great Debates".

...there Must Be A Sequence To Learning, That Perseverance And A Certain Measure Of Perspiration Are Indispensable, That Individual Pleasures Must Frequently Be Submerged In The Interests Of Group Cohesion, And That Learning To Be Critical And To Think Conceptually And Rigorously Do Not Come Easily To The Young But Are Hard-fought Victories.

People Like Ourselves May See Nothing Wondrous In Writing, But Our Anthropologists Know How Strange And Magical It Appears To A Purely Oral People - A Conversation With No One And Yet With Everyone. What Could Be Stranger Than The Silence One Encounters When Addressing A Question To A Text? What Could Be More Metaphysically Puzzling Than Addressing An Unseen Audience, As Every Writer Of Books Must Do? And Correcting Oneself Because One Knows That An Unknown Reader Will Disapprove Or Misunderstand?

The Whole Problem With News On Television Comes Down To This: All The Words Uttered In An Hour Of News Coverage Could Be Printed On A Page Of A Newspaper. And The World Cannot Be Understood In One Page.

Television Is Altering The Meaning Of 'being Informed' By Creating A Species Of Information That Might Properly Be Called Disinformation. Disinformation Does Not Mean False Information. It Means Misleading Information - Misplaced, Irrelevant, Fragmented Or Superficial Information - Information That Creates The Illusion Of Knowing Something, But Which In Fact Leads One Away From Knowing.

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.

An Educated Mind Is Practiced In The Uses Of Reason, Which Inevitably Leads To A Skeptical Outlook.

The Shock Of Twentieth-century Technology Numbed Our Brains And We Are Just Beginning To Notice The Spiritual And Social Debris That Our Technology Has Strewn About Us.

Children Are The Living Messages We Send To A Time We Will Not See. From A Biological Point Of View It Is Inconceivable That Any Culture Will Forget That It Needs To Reproduce Itself. But It Is Quite Possible For A Culture To Exist Without A Social Idea Of Children. Unlike Infancy, Childhood Is A Social Artifact, Not A Biological Category.

The Problem In The 19th Century With Information Was That We Lived In A Culture Of Information Scarcity, And So Humanity Addressed That Problem Beginning With Photography And Telegraphy And The - In The 1840s. We Tried To Solve The Problem Of Overcoming The Limitations Of Space, Time, And Form.

Children Enter School As Question Marks And Leave As Periods.

Information Is Now A Commodity That Can Be Bought And Sold, Or Used As A Form Of Entertainment, Or Worn Like A Garment To Enhance One's Status. It Comes Indiscriminately, Directed At No One In Particular, Disconnected From Usefulness; We Are Glutted With Information, Drowning In Information, Have No Control Over It, Don't Know What To Do With It.

Certainty Abolishes Hope, And Robs Us Of Renewal.

If Politics Is Like Show Business, Then The Idea Is Not To Pursue Excellence, Clarity Or Honesty But To Appear As If You Are, Which Is Another Matter Altogether.

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 Succeeds: Objectivity, Efficiency, Expertise, Standardization, Measurement, And Progress. It Also Came To Be Believed That The Engine Of Technological Progress Worked Most Efficiently When People Are Conceived Of Not As Children Of God Or Even As Citizens But As Consumers-that Is To Say, As Markets.

When Two Human Beings Get Together, They're Co-present, There Is Built Into It A Certain Responsibility We Have For Each Other, And When People Are Co-present In Family Relationships And Other Relationships, That Responsibility Is There. You Can't Just Turn Off A Person. On The Internet, You Can.

Everything We Know Has Its Origins In Questions. Questions, We Might Say, Are The Principal Intellectual Instruments Available To Human Beings.

Embedded In Every Technology There Is A Powerful Idea, Sometimes Two Or Three Powerful Ideas. Like Language Itself, A Technology Predisposes Us To Favor And Value Certain Perspectives And Accomplishments And To Subordinate Others. Every Technology Has A Philosophy, Which Is Given Expression In How The Technology Makes People Use Their Minds, In How It Codifies The World, In Which Of Our Senses It Amplifies, In Which Of Our Emotional And Intellectual Tendencies It Disregards.

Nothing Could Be More Misleading Than The Idea That Computer Technology Introduced The Age Of Information. The Printing Press Began That Age, And We Have Not Been Free Of It Since.

I Believe I Am Not Mistaken In Saying That Christianity Is A Demanding And Serious Religion. When It Is Delivered As Easy And Amusing, It Is Another Kind Of Religion Altogether.

'the Scientific Method,' Thomas Henry Huxley Once Wrote, 'is Nothing But The Normal Working Of The Human Mind.' That Is To Say, When The Mind Is Working; That Is To Say Further, When It Is Engaged In Correcting Its Mistakes.

Scientific Method

Childhood Is Analogous To Language Learning. It Has A Biological Basis But Cannot Be Realized Unless A Social Environment Triggers And Nurtures It, That Is, Has Need Of It. If A Culture Is Dominated By A Medium That Requires The Segregation Of The Young In Order That They Learn Unnatural, Specialized, And Complex Skills And Attitudes, Then Childhood, In One Form Or Another, Will Emerge, Articulate And Indispensable.

The Spectacle We Find In True Religions Has As Its Purpose Enchantment, Not Entertainment. The Distinction Is Critical. By Endowing Things With Magic, Enchantment Is A Means Through Which We May Gain Access To Sacredness. Entertainment Is The Means Through Which We Distance Ourselves From It.

For The Message Of Television As Metaphor Is Not Only That All The World Is A Stage But That The Stage Is Located In Las Vegas, Nevada.

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