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Anna Peterman

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“It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

tags: censorship, independent-thought, technology-addiction, thinking

45 likes

“We do not measure a culture based on its output of undisguised trivialities, but what it claims as significant.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

tags: intellect, recreation

10 likes

“To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

tags: analytical-thinking, deduction, inference, reading

5 likes

“We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase. The principle strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

tags: communication, public-discourse, telegraphy, typography

5 likes

“Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation. The learner must be allowed to enter at any point without prejudice. This is why you shall never hear or see a television program begin with the caution that if the viewer has not seen the previous programs, this one will be meaningless. Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

tags: education, epistemology, knowledge, learning, rational-thought, television

11 likes

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