Neil Postman Case

"technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything". -- Neil Postman

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 - October 5, 2003) was an American author, and media theorist. (Wikipedia) Postman seemed to be not fond of new technology, believing is would have negative consequences. He is known for his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which he wrote about television and the harmful effects it has on humans.

Many will compare and contrast Postman with another theorist, Marshall McLuhan. I think Marshall Mcluhan was not as direct with his theories, he is like a magician, lots of smoke and mirrors. While Postman seems more direct and worried about the effect of the media. Postman points out that television and other forms of media do not help students learn, they only make students like television more and make them lose interest in an actual classroom setting. McLuhan says that television was a 'cool' medium, low in intensity and high in participation.

Postman wrote the article "Television as Teacher" saying that Sesame Street, and other educational shows like it are teaching kids something else entirely. He was fearful that we were not reading enough and only learning and teaching through television entertainment.

Postman says that both parents and teachers on a whole approve of Sesame Street pointing out that parents did not have feel guilty about allowing their children to watch hours of television a day, instead of trying to encourage children to learn the traditional way, reading or lecturing, (the villageer)

I think Postman was so worried that we as a society would not be able to communicate effectivity and that television and media were making it worse. Think about a world without television media, what would the society be like? In "Amusing Ourselves To Death" Postman explains just how much of an impact entertainment has shaped our life in ways we cannot even imagine. In today's society, everything we watch has some sort of entertainment lurking behind it, we are so adapt to entertainment being in our life, we aren't aware of the damages it's doing to our own selves. Short attention span is one of many problems Television media has created; we now have access to hundreds of different channels in a touch of a button. Television media is altering the way we received our information negatively because of music being paramount when played during the news, discussions about a certain topics on Television news is too brief, all of these problems will have the result of making us ignorant on how we look at how the world truly is. Postman believed that television had changed the way that we learn, and it had "irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the