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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Neil Postman
Read between
June 10 - June 23, 2025
how the image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word;
something. It’s a counterpunch to what my father thought daily TV news was: “inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.”
The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV).
in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
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 that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.
Roberto Andonie liked this
in America God favors all those who possess both a talent and a format to amuse,
two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas.
Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.
the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers.
we must take into account the symbolic forms of their information, the source of their information, the quantity and speed of their information, the context in which their information is experienced.
And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.
the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense.
we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric.
Every medium of communication, I am claiming, has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large.
there is a residual belief in the power of speech, and speech alone, to carry the truth;
Why do you assume the accuracy of a print-referenced citation but not a speech-referenced one?
The written word endures, the spoken word disappears; and that is why writing is closer to the truth than speaking.
the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.
Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned.
Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them.
the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.
importance as cultures have undergone media change. As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
Bertrand Russell called an “immunity to eloquence,” meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure, or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of their argument.
the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist.
We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word.
every new technology for thinking involves a trade-off.
Media change does not necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it is the other way around.
the four-hundred-year imperial dominance of typography was of far greater benefit than deficit.
Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.
the form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be.
“the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; . . . print made a greater impression than actual events.
Learning became book-learning.”
The first printing press in America was established in 1638 as an adjunct of Harvard University, which was two years old at the time.
Americans first tried their hand on September 25, 1690, in Boston, when Benjamin Harris printed the first edition of a three-page paper he called Publick Occurrences
Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books.
“parties do not write books to combat each other’s opinions, but pamphlets,
the Lyceum Movement had as its purpose the diffusion of knowledge, the promotion of common schools, the creation of libraries
America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations.
from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was virtually all that was available.
the use of language as a means of complex argument was an important, pleasurable and common form of discourse in almost every public arena.
the speakers and their audience were habituated to a kind of oratory that may be described as literary.
the resonance of typography was ever-present. Here was argument and counterargument, claim and counterclaim, criticism of relevant texts, the most careful scrutiny of the previously uttered sentences of one’s opponent. In short, the Lincoln-Douglas debates may be described as expository prose lifted whole from the printed page.
language is the principal medium of communication—especially language controlled by the rigors of print—an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result. The idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument guiding one’s thought.
In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas.
the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment.
