Chapter 2.
Media as Epistemology
“As Walter Ong points out, in oral cultures proverbs and sayings are not occasional devices: ‘They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Though in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them.”
"all that glitters is not gold," for example is a proverb.
pp. 18-19
“Thus we may say there is a clash of resonances in our concept of legal truth. On the one hand, there is a residual belief in the power of speech, and speech alone, to carry the truth; on the other hand, there is a much stronger belief in the authenticity of writing and, in particular, printing.”
19
“The law is what legislators and judges have written. In our culture, lawyers do not have to be wise; they need to be well briefed.”
20
“But to the people that invented it, the Sophists of fifth century BC Greece and their heirs, rhetoric was not merely an opportunity for dramatic performance but a near indispensable means of organizing evidence and proofs and therefore of communicating truth.”
22
“To the Greeks rhetoric was a form of spoken writing.”
“rhetoric was the proper means through which ‘right opinion’ was to be both discovered and articulated.”
22
“The point I am leading to by this and previous examples is that the concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that ‘truth’ is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.”
22-23
“We have enough of our own (prejudices), as for example,the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification. In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers.”
23
“But the modern minds, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers.”
23
“there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take.”
24
Discussion of nature as discovered in myth and ritual pp. 24-25
Galileo “the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is.”
24
Sources
next
Chapter 3.
Typographic America.
“The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou be entrapped by them for all time.”
P. 31.
The premise of this book:
“that the form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be.”
p. 31.
New England Puritanism and Calinvinist off-shoots demanded literacy and that required schooling.
p. 31-32
Popular ditty (song):
“From public schools shall general knowledge flow
for tis the people’s sacred right to know.”
33
“Beginning in the sixteenth century, a great epistemological shift had taken place in which knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and made manifest through, the printed page.”
33
Postman quotes Lewis Mumford:
“More than any other device the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local….to exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended to become more shadowy. Learning became book-learning.”
In 1660 there were 444 schools in England, one for every twelve miles. (528 square miles).
“growth in literacy was closely connected to schooling.”
33
Democratization of opinions based on widespread reading, seen not (as in Europe) an elitist activity (at least in New England).
34
Quotes Howard Fast with respect to the 300,000 copies of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
“Taking a figure of 400,000 in a population of 3,000,000, a book published today would have to sell 24,000,000 copies to do as well.”
pp. 34-35
As America moved into the nineteenth century, it did so as a fully print-based culture in all of its regions.” (N&S), possessed libraries intended for the working class.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 305,000 copies in its first year, the equivalent of four million in today’s America.
p. 39
Sources
Next
Chapter 4.
Typographic Mind
“The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of its monopoly. This cannot be stressed enough, especially for those who are reluctant to acknowledge profound differences in the media environments of then and now.”
[1830s-1980s ]
p. 41.
“But from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was virtually all that was available. There were no movies to see, no radio to hear, photographic displays to look at, records to play.+ There was no television.”
“Public business was channeled into and expressed through print, which became the model, the metaphor, and the measure of all discourse.”
“The resonances of the lineal, analytical structure of print, and in particular, of expository prose, could be felt every where. For example, in how people talked.”
“America was as dominated by the printed word and the oratory based on the printed word as any society we know of.”
p. 41.
“…what Tocqueville is describing here is a kind of printed orality, which was observable in diverse forms of oral discourse.”
42
“I do not mean to say that print merely influenced the form of public discourse. That does not say much unless one connects it to the more important idea that form will determine the nature of content.”
Marx asked in The German Ideology if the Illiad was now possible in the age of the printing press.
“Is it not inevitable that with the emergence of the press, the singing and the telling and the muse cease: that is, the conditions necessary for epic poetry disappear?”
Marx quoted in Postman,
pp. 42-43.
“..the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.”
43
“how the press worked as a metaphor and an epistemology to create a serious and rational public conversation, from which we have now been so dramatically separated.”
43
Examples:
Lincoln and Douglas debated for four hours
pp. 44-45
Story and Webster
Amusing Ourselves to Death,
Sources
Next
Chapter 5
A ‘Peek-a-boo’ world: How communications combined with transportation removed us from the immediate present.
See here: as an outline.
"The new idea was that transportation and communication could be disengaged from each other, that space was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information."
p. 64.
There is no more disturbing consequence of the electronic and graphic revolution than this: that the world as given to us through television seems natural, not bizarre. … the extent to which we have adjusted is a measure of the extent to which we have changed.
Postman's intention is: to "make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example ... that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality ... and that television speaks in only one persistent voice — the voice of entertainment.
that to enter the great television conversation, one American cultural institution after another is learning to speak its terms."
"Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business."
Next
Chapter 6
Age of Show Business – peril of “rear-view mirror” thinking
"But the television screen is more than a light source. It is a smooth neatly flat surface on which the printed word may be displayed . . . .an electronic bulletin board."
p. 83.
Sources
Next
Chapter 7
Metaphors of discontinuity phrases which allow us to become more removed.
"Uh Oh" … "a conjunction … that separates everything from everything."
p. 99.
Robert MacNeil on television news.
p. 105-106.
"What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation.… does not mean false information. It means misinformation--misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, or superficial information…that creates the illusion of knowing something."
p. 107.
"All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.."
pp. 110-111.
He fears that society "will dance and dream themselves into oblivion [rather] than march into it."
"As the printing press did in an earlier time, television has achieved the power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also defined how we shall respond to it."
p. 111.
"So we move rapidly into an information environment which may be rightly called trivial pursuit -- [a game] which uses facts as a source of amusement, so do our sources of news."
"It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes."
p. 113.
Sources
Next
Chapter 8
Prosperity as religions’ true intent—the selling of God
"As it brings one nearer to Jesus, it also provides advice on how to increase one's bank account."
p. 114.
"Most Americans, including preachers, have difficulty accepting the truth, if they think about it at all, that not all forms of discourse can be converted from one medium to another. It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture, or value."
p. 117.
Sources
Next
Chapter 9
Elections and the media: the selling of democratic values
"Politics is the greatest spectator sport in America."
p. 125.
"Of course the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. . . . But television commercials make hash of it."
"If that universe of discourse [the context in which propositions are either true or false] is discarded, then the application of empirical tests tests, logical analysis, or any of the other instruments of reason are impotent."
p. 127
"The television commercial has been the chief instrument in creating the modern methods of presenting political ideas."
Ramsay Clark ran against Jacob Javits using well-developed position papers -- exposition based on background, examples, and evidence to support his argumentation.
"He might as well have drawn cartoons."
Javits "Built his campaign on a series of thirty-second television commercials in which he used visual imagery, in much the same way as a MacDonald's commercial, to project himself as a man of experience, virtue, and piety."
p. 129
Sources
Next
Chapter 10
Teaching as an amusing activity
"Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which cereal has the most crackle."
p. 142
"Television is a curriculum."
Sources
Next
Chapter 11
Huxleyan warning: Television’s role
"There are two ways by which the spirit of culture may be shriveled.
- In the first--culture becomes a prison.
- In the second-- the culture becomes a burlesque."
Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World concerning the willingness of people to want thought control.
His is a look at history thematically from the age of exposition and the typographical mind to the age of show business and the schizoid mind that transport and communication revolutions currently nourish –if not endow with—a power of site and sound to squash, hush and suppress the informed heart.
Sources
reform culture
Susan Sontag
Ecojustice
Sources
Water- private property or public good?
The ten lessons of Postman and Sontag
Overseas, or Foreign
Press a sampling
USA print media, daily newspapers
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans and James Agee, 1941.
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overview
Neil Postman, 
His point was to show readers that each new advantage derived from inventions is wrapped around disadvantages
