In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.
Neil PostmanTags: philosophy technology utilitarianism
We do not measure a culture based on its output of undisguised trivialities, but what it claims as significant.
Neil PostmanTags: intellect recreation
It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.
Neil PostmanTags: thinking censorship independent-thought technology-addiction
enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.
Neil PostmanTags: sacredness
With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.
Neil PostmanTags: media television context
Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.
Neil PostmanTags: progress communication technology television culture ideology utopia
For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers or Marshall McLuhan's (quite different answers, by the way). This is an instance in which the asking of the questions is sufficient. To ask is to break the spell.
Neil PostmanTags: communication technology culture ideology
It is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent origin and power
Neil PostmanThe credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. (102)
Neil PostmanTags: truth credibility proposition test
To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.
Neil PostmanTags: reading deduction inference analytical-thinking
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