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wombatwolf's review against another edition
3.0
I'm of half-agreement with this. I do think there is a lot of great insight here on the role of media in shrinking the boundaries between adults and children, particularly the theories about the erosion of "secret knowledge" as the boundary line between childhood and adulthood. I do not entirely agree with the idea that children need to be completely separate from the adult world however. I fear we have veered too heavily as a culture toward a "worst of both" -- children are given far too much "secret knowledge" through media, but we afford them no real independence with which to make use of that knowledge once they, unavoidably, acquire it.
I don't mean kids should be having sex or getting jobs, but we are running into issues where kids are bombarded with the knowledge of the adult world, but then, through our built environment, social strictures, or parenting styles, or whatever, we don't let them leave the house to play unsupervised with their friends, or ride their bikes to school, and treat them as ultrafragile baby nothings. No wonder they are miserable upon reaching their self-conscious tween years. And now, with zoomers coming of age as the first true smartphone/info-avalanche generation....bringing to the forefront an unthinkable mental health crisis (how many people do you know who are on psychotropic medication? I'm 27 and it's 1/3 of my friends, maybe more).
I suggest a focus on independent children creating their OWN realm as one of many, overlapping with but not subsumed within the adult "realm" - where they can safely "test" out being adults through, say, going to the corner store, playing unsupervised, going to school or to a park or natural area, or even getting what used to be childrens' jobs like paper routes or landscaping gigs -- whatever their modern analogues may be.
I don't mean kids should be having sex or getting jobs, but we are running into issues where kids are bombarded with the knowledge of the adult world, but then, through our built environment, social strictures, or parenting styles, or whatever, we don't let them leave the house to play unsupervised with their friends, or ride their bikes to school, and treat them as ultrafragile baby nothings. No wonder they are miserable upon reaching their self-conscious tween years. And now, with zoomers coming of age as the first true smartphone/info-avalanche generation....bringing to the forefront an unthinkable mental health crisis (how many people do you know who are on psychotropic medication? I'm 27 and it's 1/3 of my friends, maybe more).
I suggest a focus on independent children creating their OWN realm as one of many, overlapping with but not subsumed within the adult "realm" - where they can safely "test" out being adults through, say, going to the corner store, playing unsupervised, going to school or to a park or natural area, or even getting what used to be childrens' jobs like paper routes or landscaping gigs -- whatever their modern analogues may be.
shayneh's review against another edition
5.0
Parenthood-changing: this gave me a better and clearer idea of what it means to have a childhood, and the determination to ensure that my children have a decent crack at it.
Interesting note: much of the subject matter and discussion of technology coincides with Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which I happened to be reading around the same time.
Interesting note: much of the subject matter and discussion of technology coincides with Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which I happened to be reading around the same time.
gvenezia's review against another edition
4.0
Conservatism By Another Name? Postman's Linguistification of Cultural Development and His Reactionary Moral
After finishing my third book by Neil Postman, I've realized he might be one of the most interesting and unusual conservative cultural critics in the last few decades. At the core of [b:Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business|74034|Amusing Ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business|Neil Postman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568871230l/74034._SY75_.jpg|2337731], [b:Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology|79678|Technopoly The Surrender of Culture to Technology|Neil Postman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388365812l/79678._SY75_.jpg|1511641], and The Disappearance of Childhood is the argument for a conservation of a human capacity, namely advanced literacy, that is being rapidly displaced by visual entertainment.
To read Postman is to glimpse an often underemphasized stage of human development—a rise from perpetual childhood to what we now consider adulthood. Postman argues that childhood was created in the last 500 years or so with the creation of the printing press and the rise of literacy; the converse of this claim is that a new form of adult required the creation of an educational childhood stage. In contrast to Postman's framing, this new category of adult is what is really important to society. It's a new stage of development in the human species that is expected of all and is tied to the printed word. This new form of adulthood is what has enabled the modern world.
According to Postman, the rise of graphic culture and technology and their inbuilt logics are in the process of breaking down this stage of development. The framing in this book is to note how adulthood now bears many of the markers of childhood and vice versa—that what we find interesting, attractive, and important are now nearly identical between child and adult. Postman makes an interesting case and I'm sympathetic to many of his claims, but I think he focused on the less interesting side of development.
The loss of adulthood as we know it is the real impactful side. Without a highly literate and discursively engaged population, we suffer a huge opportunity cost. By progressively forging ahead, creatively destroying our literate heritage, we fail to conserve the most important human capacity to ever culturally evolve. With it we have exponentially grown the wealth of the world, democratized nations and artistic traditions, and catalyzed the most productive age of art. Without it, we risk relying on an aristocracy of the willing and able.
Or at least, such is the reactionary mood Postman puts me into. The contemporary world feels far too complex to decide whether Postman has been right yet. But at the very least, he provides one of the most generative and slyly conservative arguments worth considering in recent decades.
After finishing my third book by Neil Postman, I've realized he might be one of the most interesting and unusual conservative cultural critics in the last few decades. At the core of [b:Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business|74034|Amusing Ourselves to Death Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business|Neil Postman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568871230l/74034._SY75_.jpg|2337731], [b:Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology|79678|Technopoly The Surrender of Culture to Technology|Neil Postman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388365812l/79678._SY75_.jpg|1511641], and The Disappearance of Childhood is the argument for a conservation of a human capacity, namely advanced literacy, that is being rapidly displaced by visual entertainment.
To read Postman is to glimpse an often underemphasized stage of human development—a rise from perpetual childhood to what we now consider adulthood. Postman argues that childhood was created in the last 500 years or so with the creation of the printing press and the rise of literacy; the converse of this claim is that a new form of adult required the creation of an educational childhood stage. In contrast to Postman's framing, this new category of adult is what is really important to society. It's a new stage of development in the human species that is expected of all and is tied to the printed word. This new form of adulthood is what has enabled the modern world.
According to Postman, the rise of graphic culture and technology and their inbuilt logics are in the process of breaking down this stage of development. The framing in this book is to note how adulthood now bears many of the markers of childhood and vice versa—that what we find interesting, attractive, and important are now nearly identical between child and adult. Postman makes an interesting case and I'm sympathetic to many of his claims, but I think he focused on the less interesting side of development.
The loss of adulthood as we know it is the real impactful side. Without a highly literate and discursively engaged population, we suffer a huge opportunity cost. By progressively forging ahead, creatively destroying our literate heritage, we fail to conserve the most important human capacity to ever culturally evolve. With it we have exponentially grown the wealth of the world, democratized nations and artistic traditions, and catalyzed the most productive age of art. Without it, we risk relying on an aristocracy of the willing and able.
Or at least, such is the reactionary mood Postman puts me into. The contemporary world feels far too complex to decide whether Postman has been right yet. But at the very least, he provides one of the most generative and slyly conservative arguments worth considering in recent decades.
el_entrenador_loco's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
judahfromtexas's review against another edition
4.0
Strikingly relevant (outside of a handful of somewhat dated anecdotes here and there) and well-argued. I don't agree with everything he has to say (although I agree more than I disagree), but like in his other works, he makes a credible and convincing case for his arguments. Highly recommend a read through a critical lens.
eupomene's review against another edition
3.0
Of all the books by Postman that I've read this one is the grimmest. Probably because he combines most of his pet issues (TV, technology, education, etc) into the one big cause of this book's problem. I still agree with many of his points, but I could not completely swallow his fear that childhood is disappearing.
I agree that the media is a danger to children (especially girls) -- in their literacy, self-image, and position in the world -- and must be managed. Technology's latest, the internet, of which Postman writes about too early to truly discuss, doesn't help either. And so on down the line. But I had a childhood, so did my brother, so did my husband. I think that parents can have and will have a hand in any solution.
I found Postman's little history of the idea of childhood quite fascinating, and very believable. It was the best part of the book. Beyond that, take with a grain of salt. Not everything about our changing world and the media's place in it is an automatic negative.
I agree that the media is a danger to children (especially girls) -- in their literacy, self-image, and position in the world -- and must be managed. Technology's latest, the internet, of which Postman writes about too early to truly discuss, doesn't help either. And so on down the line. But I had a childhood, so did my brother, so did my husband. I think that parents can have and will have a hand in any solution.
I found Postman's little history of the idea of childhood quite fascinating, and very believable. It was the best part of the book. Beyond that, take with a grain of salt. Not everything about our changing world and the media's place in it is an automatic negative.
nobelpeachprize's review against another edition
3.0
The more time passes, the weirder this book gets
stephenl's review against another edition
2.0
I was on a good reading streak this year when I picked up Postman's book. For someone who is very critical of TV, Postman must have spent a lot of time watching TV in order to reach some of his conclusions. The book is very dry; while very thin, it is not fun to read and it took me a long time to get through it. There are some ideas and historical data, which are interesting, but at times Postman sounds like that uncle who one struggles to get away from; the one who complains about how children are not children any more. Of course, that complaint is at least 2,000 years old - some of it appears in the Bible. The fact that he relies entirely on American and European data for his thesis doesn't help. Overall, I found this book disappointing considering the hype. I am glad that I read it 30 years after it was published so that I wasn't swept along with the alarmism that runs through it.