Neil Postman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neil Postman (March 8, 1931 - October 5, 2003) was a prominent American educator, media theorist, and cultural critic. For more than forty years, he was associated with New York University.

Inspired by the values of Classical and Enlightenment culture, Postman was something of an old-fashioned humanist, who in the face of extraordinary technological change in contemporary society held firmly to his beliefs that "there is a limit to the promise of new technology, and that it cannot be a substitute for human values". ^[1]

Contents 1 Education and career 2 Works 2.1 Amusing Ourselves to Death 3 Trivia 4 Quotations 5 Selected bibliography 6 Notes 7 References

[edit] Education and career

Postman was born and spent most of his life in New York City before dying in 2003. In 1953, he graduated from State University of New York at Fredonia. He received a master's degree in 1955 and a doctorate in education in 1958, both from the Teachers College, Columbia University, and started teaching at New York University in 1959.

In 1971, he founded the program in media ecology at the Steinhardt School of Education of NYU, attracting a large audience for his lectures and writings over the years. In 1993 he was appointed a University Professor, the only one in the School of Education, and was chairman of the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002. Among his students are noted authors Jib Fowles, Dennis Smith, and Paul Levinson.

[edit] Works

Postman wrote 18 books and more than 200 magazine and newspaper articles for such periodicals as The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Time Magazine, The Saturday Review, The Harvard Education Review, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Stern, and Le Monde. He was the editor of the quarterly journal ETC.; A review of General Semantics (founded by S.I. Hayakawa in 1943) from 1976 to 1986. He was also on the editorial board of The Nation.

[edit] Amusing Ourselves to Death

Perhaps Postman's best known title is Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985. It is a largely historical narrative in which he deplored the decline of the communication medium as first telegraphy replaced the local written word and then as images began to replace the written word. Postman asserted that by its very nature, television confounds serious issues with entertainment, demeaning and undermining political discourse by making it less about ideas and more about image. He also argues that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only passive information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning. He draws on the ideas of media guru Marshall McLuhan to theorize that different media are appropriate for different kinds of knowledge, and describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures value and transfer information in different ways. He states repeatedly that 19th century America was the pinnacle of rational argument, truly being an Age of Reason. In this period, where the dominant communication medium was the printed word, says Postman, complicated truths could effectively and usefully enter the cultural life of the nation without oversimplification. Amusing Ourselves to Death was translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide.

[edit] Trivia

• Postman is in the SUNY Fredonia Sports Hall of Fame for baseball and basketball. He was an avid fan of sports, especially the New York Mets.

• He was named by the Confederation of SUNY Alumni Associations as Distinguished Alumnus of the Year for 2000.

[edit] Quotations

• I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology. However, it is possible for us to learn how to control our own uses of technology. The "forum" that I think is best suited for this is our educational system. If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it. ^[2]

• Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration. Printing created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing assisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism into a sordid if not a murderous emotion. Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example, will, in the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as blacksmiths were made obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made obsolete by the printing press. Technological change, in other words, always results in winners and losers. ^[3]

• A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one. Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk

[edit] Selected bibliography

• Television and the Teaching of English (1961)
• Linguistics: a revolution in teaching with Charles Weingartner (Dell Publishing, 1966).

This book introduces linguistics with an orientation toward language teachers.

• Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969) with Charles Weingartner.
• The soft revolution : a student handbook for turning schools around with Charles Weingartner (Delacorte Press, 1971).
• The School Book: for people who want to know what all the hollering is about with Charles Weingartner (Delacorte Press, 1973).

this was a survey of then-current controversies in public education. Postman and Weingartner pointed out an issue that Christina Hoff Sommers also treated at length in her 2001 book The War Against Boys -- that since the behavior expected of children in school is generally to be quiet and docile, boys might have a harder time than girls in schools because this docility contradicts the social role expected of boys outside school.

• Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: how we defeat ourselves by the way we talk and what to do about it (1976).

This book essentially treats General Semantics from Postman's viewpoint; it is currently out of print.

• Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979).
• The Disappearance of Childhood (1982).
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985).

This book inspired Roger Waters' album "Amused to Death".)

• Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education (1988).
• How to Watch TV News, with Steve Powers(1992) .
• Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)
• The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995)
• Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (1999)
• Where Do We Go From Here: The Quest for Narratives in a Technological Society. The 2000 Laing Lectures sponsored by Regent College in Vancouver, B.C.

Audio recordings of the three lectures delivered by Postman (including formal responses from Regent College faculty and questions from the audience) are available from the College's bookstore. ^[4]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ PBS Interview, 1996
2. ^ 1996 PBS interview
3. ^ "Informing Ourselves to Death" (1990)
4. ^ Regent College bookstore

[edit] References

• The Neil Postman Information Page
• Neil Postman: Collected Online Articles
• Neil Postman Writing on the Web
• Many Neil Postman Quotes
• Discussion on Technology with Scott London (MP3)