Scan barcode
paladintodd's review against another edition
1.0
Really hating this book - it's solidly in "old man declares new technology is bad, bad I say!". Most disgusting, it's all dressed up as a scholarly book while being devoid of any reason at all.
First off, as in all old man bitches, we have to start with "the good ole days". In this case, Portman gives us a full chapter on his ideal time: The Lincoln-Douglas debates and the days when "boys would read Emerson while plowing the fields" (to paraphrase). The latter I'm guessing is bullshit, but let's pretend the former is true.
Portman then turns his attention to TV and makes his declaration that "information without action" is worthless and that his complaint about TV and modern "news" - it doesn't actually change anything for the consumer of it. He throws in that voting is a worthless action as well - that voting alone is not a worthy enough use of information.
OK, the folks listening to the Lincoln-Douglas debate in your imaginary Utopia took what ACTION? Oh, that's right, they took no action at all. Maybe it affected how they voted, but that was it. His good ole days fails the very criteria he puts on modern technology.
Portman's premise is bullshit and his conclusion is equally bullshit. Yeah, we have new technology available to us. Technology is a tool. Sure some people use the new tools poorly while others use it to further themselves.
-----------------------------
And really, how are we supposed to take seriously a book that drapes itself in scholarly robes yet declares that gaining knowledge you don't act on is worthless? Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is worthless? Knowledge is just "an amusing bit of trivia"? This guy I should take seriously? No.
-----------------------------
Soldiering on, Part 2 would be more enlightening when he turns his attention to what he calls the Age of Show Business. He tells us that television is "a beautiful spectacle, a visual delight" and "exquisitely crafted". From that, he then immediately draws the conclusion that television "is devoted entirely to supplying its audience with entertainment".
Huh? How the hell did you reach that conclusion because you gave absolutely no evidence to support it. What a load of bullshit.
First off, as in all old man bitches, we have to start with "the good ole days". In this case, Portman gives us a full chapter on his ideal time: The Lincoln-Douglas debates and the days when "boys would read Emerson while plowing the fields" (to paraphrase). The latter I'm guessing is bullshit, but let's pretend the former is true.
Portman then turns his attention to TV and makes his declaration that "information without action" is worthless and that his complaint about TV and modern "news" - it doesn't actually change anything for the consumer of it. He throws in that voting is a worthless action as well - that voting alone is not a worthy enough use of information.
OK, the folks listening to the Lincoln-Douglas debate in your imaginary Utopia took what ACTION? Oh, that's right, they took no action at all. Maybe it affected how they voted, but that was it. His good ole days fails the very criteria he puts on modern technology.
Portman's premise is bullshit and his conclusion is equally bullshit. Yeah, we have new technology available to us. Technology is a tool. Sure some people use the new tools poorly while others use it to further themselves.
-----------------------------
And really, how are we supposed to take seriously a book that drapes itself in scholarly robes yet declares that gaining knowledge you don't act on is worthless? Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is worthless? Knowledge is just "an amusing bit of trivia"? This guy I should take seriously? No.
-----------------------------
Soldiering on, Part 2 would be more enlightening when he turns his attention to what he calls the Age of Show Business. He tells us that television is "a beautiful spectacle, a visual delight" and "exquisitely crafted". From that, he then immediately draws the conclusion that television "is devoted entirely to supplying its audience with entertainment".
Huh? How the hell did you reach that conclusion because you gave absolutely no evidence to support it. What a load of bullshit.
nrt43's review against another edition
5.0
This book I realize now after reading it again has been a significant influence in how I see the world, and it deserves fuller exploration. I book-marked many places. Here are my bookmarks from the first half of the book:
---
"We are all... great abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible so as to accept it."
"The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation."
"The God of the Jews was to exist in the word and through the word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy, so that a new kind of god could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic conjunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominate influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations."
The best things on television are it's junk.... We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities, but by what it claims as significant.
The River Metaphor
"I find it useful to think of the situation in this way. Changes in the symbolic environment are like changes in the natural environment: they are both gradual and additive at first, and then all at once, a critical mass is achieved... a river that has slowly been polluted, suddenly becomes toxic. Most of the fish perish. Swimming becomes a danger to health. But even then the river may look the same and one may still take a boat ride on it. In other words, even when life has been taken from it, the river does not disappear, nor do all of its uses, but its value has been seriously diminished, and its degraded condition will have harmful effects through the landscape. It is this way with our symbolic environment. We have reached I believe a critical mass in that electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose information, ideas, and epistemology are given form by the television, not by the printed word....
In the analogy I have drawn above, the river refers largely to what we call 'public discourse,' our political, religious, informational, and commercial forms of conversation. I am arguing that a television based epistemology pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape, not that it pollutes everything...." This resonates as truth for me. Today, the more people "swim" in the river of media and in particular politics, often the less healthy they mentally become.
"The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography's definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevence, impotence, and incoherence."
At the end of chapter five Postman lays out a summary of the rest of the book:
"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing, that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality, that the phrase 'serious television' is a contradiction in terms and that television speaks in only one persistent voice, the voice of entertainment. Beyond that I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one great 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. It is entirely possible of course that in the end we shall find that delightful and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, 50 years ago."
This book was written in 1985. His prophetic message has been fulfilled in 2020. Not sure what that means for the future...
---
"We are all... great abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible so as to accept it."
"The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation."
"The God of the Jews was to exist in the word and through the word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy, so that a new kind of god could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic conjunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominate influence on the formation of the culture's intellectual and social preoccupations."
The best things on television are it's junk.... We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities, but by what it claims as significant.
The River Metaphor
"I find it useful to think of the situation in this way. Changes in the symbolic environment are like changes in the natural environment: they are both gradual and additive at first, and then all at once, a critical mass is achieved... a river that has slowly been polluted, suddenly becomes toxic. Most of the fish perish. Swimming becomes a danger to health. But even then the river may look the same and one may still take a boat ride on it. In other words, even when life has been taken from it, the river does not disappear, nor do all of its uses, but its value has been seriously diminished, and its degraded condition will have harmful effects through the landscape. It is this way with our symbolic environment. We have reached I believe a critical mass in that electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose information, ideas, and epistemology are given form by the television, not by the printed word....
In the analogy I have drawn above, the river refers largely to what we call 'public discourse,' our political, religious, informational, and commercial forms of conversation. I am arguing that a television based epistemology pollutes public communication and its surrounding landscape, not that it pollutes everything...." This resonates as truth for me. Today, the more people "swim" in the river of media and in particular politics, often the less healthy they mentally become.
"The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography's definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevence, impotence, and incoherence."
At the end of chapter five Postman lays out a summary of the rest of the book:
"It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing, that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality, that the phrase 'serious television' is a contradiction in terms and that television speaks in only one persistent voice, the voice of entertainment. Beyond that I will try to demonstrate that to enter the great television conversation, one great 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. It is entirely possible of course that in the end we shall find that delightful and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, 50 years ago."
This book was written in 1985. His prophetic message has been fulfilled in 2020. Not sure what that means for the future...
bryce_is_a_librarian's review against another edition
4.0
I'm surprised the shade of Neil Postman doesn't appear in DC from time to time shrieking in horror.
jacoboner's review against another edition
4.0
Enformasyon dünyasının iletişim boyutundan bakışın iç dinamiklerini göz önüne seren güzel bir kitap.
katie_berry's review against another edition
5.0
This book is straight fire! I wonder what Postman would say about our society almost 40 years after this book was published. It’s definitely caused me to stop and ponder. I will definitely read this again.
erikars's review against another edition
1.0
This book makes two good points: the media used to communicate affects the nature of the communication, and much of modern communication on serious matters is frivolous.
That covers the first part of the book. The rest is a tiresome rant about how TV is ruining us all. The details of the rant are not worth covering, but I do think that Postman misses some important points. First, he never looks to see if there is any good in a visual based communication style. It is true, as he states, that a medium such as television emphasizes emotional impact over rational argument, but emotion can be a powerful motivator. An image of the damage from an earthquake or a hurricane can inspire someone to help when a description of the damage may not. Even on a rational level, a picture can be worth a thousand words as anyone who has ever tried to learn knitting can tell you.
Postman only gives the slightest of nods to the fact that textual communication can also be banal. See your favorite social network for more details.
A better approach than Postman's, which declares that TV is bad and text is good, is to realize that different communication mediums have different strengths and weaknesses. Television is excellent at providing entertainment, but that is not the only thing it is good for. No media should be the only mode of discourse. Ideally, they should be used to support and reinforce each other.
That covers the first part of the book. The rest is a tiresome rant about how TV is ruining us all. The details of the rant are not worth covering, but I do think that Postman misses some important points. First, he never looks to see if there is any good in a visual based communication style. It is true, as he states, that a medium such as television emphasizes emotional impact over rational argument, but emotion can be a powerful motivator. An image of the damage from an earthquake or a hurricane can inspire someone to help when a description of the damage may not. Even on a rational level, a picture can be worth a thousand words as anyone who has ever tried to learn knitting can tell you.
Postman only gives the slightest of nods to the fact that textual communication can also be banal. See your favorite social network for more details.
A better approach than Postman's, which declares that TV is bad and text is good, is to realize that different communication mediums have different strengths and weaknesses. Television is excellent at providing entertainment, but that is not the only thing it is good for. No media should be the only mode of discourse. Ideally, they should be used to support and reinforce each other.
chris_sanny's review against another edition
4.0
How is fragmented, superficial, brief information input impacting how we think? How do different forms of information persuade us?
-----
His primary points are: 1) The form of how we receive information shapes how we think and reason, and thus influences their quality, 2) The biggest danger to society is that we will become so focused on amusing ourselves that we will lose our ability to think critically leading to the death of the good we've built in America.
Comparing the oral and written output of America's leaders and the civic engagement of the populace before the telegraph to today is his main way of driving these points, and they are pretty convincing! Shifting from oral/writing, to telegraph, to television and beyond has changed much of our discourse. The more we open ourselves to continuous micro-dings of new input, the harder it becomes to think uninterrupted, creatively, deeply.
Some of the book would benefit from more rigorous psychological/scientific backing, but the main points are generally well enough made. Some of his assumptions are not well connected to his arguments, but these generally are peripheral and don't impact the main points.
-----
His primary points are: 1) The form of how we receive information shapes how we think and reason, and thus influences their quality, 2) The biggest danger to society is that we will become so focused on amusing ourselves that we will lose our ability to think critically leading to the death of the good we've built in America.
Comparing the oral and written output of America's leaders and the civic engagement of the populace before the telegraph to today is his main way of driving these points, and they are pretty convincing! Shifting from oral/writing, to telegraph, to television and beyond has changed much of our discourse. The more we open ourselves to continuous micro-dings of new input, the harder it becomes to think uninterrupted, creatively, deeply.
Some of the book would benefit from more rigorous psychological/scientific backing, but the main points are generally well enough made. Some of his assumptions are not well connected to his arguments, but these generally are peripheral and don't impact the main points.
anna26's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
fast-paced
4.75
i think - even forty years after this book has been published - the content of it is still relevant. Postman gives amazing examples of how television influences our way of thinking and interacting. This is definetly a must read for everyone who is interested in sociology. it definetly ecourages the reader to think about the books content and also its implication and how Neil Postman's ideas can be applied to our current world