Neil Postman Essay

In 1985, author Neil Postman released an article titled “Learning in the Age of Television”. The focus of the article is how technology, more specifically television, can influence and affect the education of children. Postman elaborates on these topics by bringing in facts and examples, such as the educational television show “Sesame Street”, to support his claims. Postman begins his article discussing how parents have embraced the educational television show “Sesame Street”. The program would prove

Thirty years ago, Neil Postman argued that with TV, we are "amusing ourselves to death." More recently, in an Internet-age response to Postman, opposing author Steven Johnson argues that "everything bad is good for you," including video games, television, Internet, and film. Neil Postman builds his argument by breaking down television into its component parts: photographs and the telegraph. He argues that both of these media inherently decontextualize their content. Photographs are inherently out

In 1985, when Neil Postman penned, Amusing Ourselves to Death, CNN, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle existed in its infancy and televangelism was still unscathed by the Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals. A B-movie actor sat in the Oval Office. Conceivably most importantly, television, the love child of the photograph and the telegraph, had reached maturity to become fully entrenched in American culture after thirty some years (p. 100). Newscasters, preachers, and politicians had become

dumbed-down since the beginning of the information era, and people are treating the serious issues that arise as entertainment. The most powerful culprit being television, has being accused of causing damage to the people that were raised in the TV era. Neil Postman’s exploration of this issue in his novel written in 1985, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a crucial hint of the consequences of being immersed in a culture that is driven by television. Even though it has been 20 years since the book was published

Neil Postman makes a few connections to politics in Amusing Ourselves to Death previous to chapter nine. In chapter nine Postman really goes in depth on politics. More specifically, he focuses on discussing how politics and political discuss are affected by television as a medium. The main points that Postman brings up when explaining problems television creates for politics are all very similar. However through the use of details and examples Postman clearly demonstrates how television has changed

author portrays a society that is controlled by making its citizens feel satisfied. Neil Postman, a contemporary social critic, explains how Brave New World has major implications in our society today. While Postman’s assertion about books is not relevant to today, his assertion that the truth will be drowned in irrelevance and the assertion that we will live in a trivial culture has implication to today’s society. Postman makes an assertion about books and how they will become obsolete. This assertion

carries a smartphone, information about everything is instantly right at our fingertips. In today’s society that may seem like a significant advantage over the past, however, in Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he presents a different view. Written some twenty years before widespread use of the internet, Postman builds a case for the liabilities of the endless amounts of information. In the fifth chapter, “The Peek-A-Boo World.” He explores the impact on the public discourse of two

Among nerds and Trekkies, Neil Postman’s portrayal of the Typographic Mind perhaps sounds very much like the mind of Mr. Spock. Like the Vulcan Mind, the Typographic Mind, utilizes a logical and rational method, it is both detached and objective. Imaginably, the Vulcans were a culture submerged in the printed word. The author paints a picture of the American written word-based culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in “The Typographic Mind”. He calls this the Age of Exposition in his

The only way humans can interact with each other is by communicating. Communicating is getting a message across to someone else, however Neil Postman who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death points out that there are many different ways this can be done. How content is presented regulates how it comes across and therefore how we react to it. There are many different ways messages can be sent, it could be through speech, gestures, writing, TV, or the newspaper. However, all these forms of communication

Between the books, You Just Don 't Understand by Deborah Tannen, and the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman I prefer the book You Just Don 't Understand. I prefer Deborah Tannen 's book because her claims about the hierarchy in men’s conversation versus the need for inclusivity in women’s conversation are interesting, as I had not acknowledged this significance in communication between the two genders before. Overall, I like Tannen’s book because it highlights stark contrast in communication