Quotes from Neil Postman

From public schools shall general knowledge flow, For 'tis the people's sacred right to know.

For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances.

In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use.

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take.

The invention of new and various kinds of communication has given a voice and an audience to many people whose opinions would otherwise not be solicited, and who, in fact, have little else but verbal excrement to contribute to public issues.

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

They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There is no parity here. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens.

Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without a moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living. Technology, in sum, is both friend and enemy.

The cosmos offers no absolute confirmations

An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan.

Silence has been replaced by background noise. It's a different world.

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a call to action. It is, in my father's words, "an inquiry ... and a lamentation," yes, but it aspires to greater things. It is an exhortation to do something. It's a counterpunch to what my father thought daily TV news was: "inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.

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.

La aparición en la arena política del asesor de imagen y el simultáneo declive del redactor de discursos atestiguan el hecho de que la televisión demanda un contenido que difiere del exigido por los otros medios. No se puede hacer filosofía política en televisión porque su forma conspira contra el contenido.

in the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut; that, in fact, we have no way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. ~Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (introduction), 1982

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean "ecological" in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change.

Lo mejor de la televisión es su basura y nadie ni nada está seriamente amenazado por ella. Porque no medimos una cultura por su producción de trivialidades no encubiertas, sino por lo que juzga significativo.

Tüketici psikodramalarla yat??t?r?lan bir hastad?r.

La inteligencia se define fundamentalmente como nuestra capacidad para captar la verdad de las cosas.

all theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification.