Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change – By Neil Postman, 1998
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I think we (I mean the HN community, as well as technology-workers in general) do a good job of self-marketing the latest technological gadget, tool, etc. The problems we like to think about (e.g. efficiency, scaling, responsiveness, etc.) are fun to solve with technology, and we sell ourselves on the latest and greatest solutions to these problems. However, we loose a bit of touch with the bigger human problems we need to solve.
I’m personally grateful for Postman’s perspectives; I think more about my technology choices and I’m more aware of the hidden effects that technologies have on my thinking. I highly recommend reading his books.
[1]: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2020-08-16-book-review-technopo...
My own view is there is some truth to what he says but overall he is too cynical. TV didn't have the damage on our society that he expected. I suspect people who talk about the damage social media and cellphones are doing to us today are also too cynical. We are incredibly adaptive creatures and while initially struggle with new technology we eventually learn healthy ways to use it.
I wonder if those who decry FOX or CNN would agree.
My conclusion is the exact opposite. While pundits on American TV News decried the sex and violence that was prevalent on the entertainment-only channels, they were slowly training us over decades to accept only two points of view that were always at war with each other (Orwell says hi). The Tale of Two Realities that we've been living in for the past 5 years is a testament to their success. The sex and the violence didn't harm us as much as they said because they were just easy punching bags the whole time. This is exactly what Postman and others were warning us about.
He actually had a lot to say about what we consume today [1] but I don't believe he had a firm grasp of social media and app drowning out our social interactions, he passed away in 2003 the year MySpace was founded.
Postman examined television in the context of 200 years of American typographically delivered news. What was different about newspapers, pamphlets, magazines and journals is that the written form encouraged the presentation of evidence and the construction of arguments with a logical foundation, often prefaced or buttressed with historical context.
Television news is different in three major ways:
1. Articles are 30 - 45 seconds long, then the topic changes to something unrelated, or a word from our sponsor.
2. Each article requires no previous knowledge of a topic. An elephant tipping over a tourist bus is featured as its own spectacle, without any consideration of how the land was used for the previous millennium.
3. The actors are personalities with images. Contrast this with print and radio where the main information that was transmitted about a news actor was his or her argument, actions, and the consequences thereof.
Postman's use of language is precise, economical, informative, and moving. His vocabulary is a deft deck.
In 1987, Postman was given the George Orwell Award for Clarity in Language by the National Council of Teachers of English. He was for ten years editor of Et Cetera, the journal of general semantics.