Amusing Myself Inane

In our last class we talked a bit about Neil Postman. If one might be allowed to have a top ten list of academics, (I’m a graduate student now, I figure I can let my inner-dorkiness out,) my friend NP would come in around number 4. He earned this position on Jon’s List of the Learned mostly due to his fabulous work Amusing Ourselves To Death.


In this fantastic work, (an academic work that’s entertaining, it can be done folks!) Postman argues that the Medium is the Metaphor. Simply put, the medium of communication influences the conversation. With this set as the premise of the book, NP goes on to praise print and tackle television. He argues that print encourages thought and rational judgment, even demands a higher order thinking, while television demands nothing of the such, being but mere entertainment. He goes on to compare our future to that of Huxley’s Brave New Word: Television and entertainment is our own soma, we have come to “adore the technologies that undo (our) ability to think.” Crap. I like TV. That can’t be good.

In an interesting turn, towards the end of the book, our mastermind NP makes an important suggestion for how to fix this little dilemma of television. He suggests that we teach students to be better consumers of the drug that is television in the schools, “The desperate answer is to rely on the only mass medium of communication that, in theory, is capable of addressing the problem: our schools.” Interesting notion. I like it, I like it a lot.

I think Postman is onto something here. In my last blog I wrote of how I see knowledge as necessarily being the product of the technologies of communication. (If anyone is interested, let me know and I can toss out some theory from Dewey and others to help support how I explained this process in the last post.) It seems that Postman might agree with me, or rather, it is I who agree with him. The subject of communication, now more than ever, must find its way into the high school classroom. Without understanding of this subject, which stresses a clearer glimpse of all the information that is thrown out at us every day, how can we be said to have a firm grip of knowledge? How can we seek to give students valuable tools of knowledge if we don’t give them even a little bit of immunity to the powerful soma of today? If they don’t get this immunity, if it soon doesn’t become the standard critical foundation upon which knowledge is built, will we be doomed to forever adore the very devices which undo our ability to think?