Quotes from Neil Postman

Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures. One

Al lector se le exigirá que asuma una actitud imparcial y objetiva. Esto incluye su aporte a la tarea de lo que Bertrand Russell denominó la "inmunidad a la elocuencia", que significa que el lector es capaz de distinguir entre el placer sensual, el encanto, o el tono insinuante (si lo hubiere) de las palabras y la lógica de su argumento.

Creo que la epistemología creada por la televisión no sólo es inferior a la epistemología basada en la imprenta, sino que es peligrosa y absurda.

theory includes a transcendent idea, as do all great world narratives.

Los estadounidenses ya no hablan entre sí, sino que se entretienen recíprocamente. No intercambian ideas, sino imágenes.

La ignorancia es siempre corregible pero, ¿qué pasaría con nosotros si llegáramos a aceptar que la ignorancia es conocimiento?

Cada uno tiene su opinión. Quizá sea más preciso llamarlas emociones en lugar de opiniones, cosa que explicaría por qué cambian cada semana.

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

Los tiranos siempre han confiado, y lo hacen aún, en la censura. Después de todo éste es el tributo que los tiranos pagan por suponer que el público conoce la diferencia entre el discurso serio y el entretenimiento, y que le importa.

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.

This may account for Americans' overuse of the courts as a means of finding coherence and stability. As other institutions become unusable as mechanisms for the control of wanton information, the courts stand as a final arbiter of truth. For how long, no one knows. I

Todo nuestro pasado nos ha preparado para reconocer y resistir una prisión cuando las rejas empiezan a cerrarse detrás de nosotros. Nos alzamos en armas contra estos problemas. Pero ¿qué si no se sienten gritos de angustia? ¿Quién está preparado para luchar contra un mar de diversiones? ¿A quién y cuándo nos quejamos, y en qué tono de voz, cuando un discurso serio se disuelve en risas estúpidas?

Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods—much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough—became the content of what people called "the news of the day.

Finalmente, Huxley intentaba decirnos que lo que afligía a la gente en "Un mundo feliz" no era que estaban riendo en lugar de pensar, sino que no sabían de qué se reían y por qué habían dejado de pensar.

Lincoln-Douglas debates may be described as expository

Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity.

America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.

Yeni teknolojiler eskiden beri süregelen enformasyon sorununu tepetaklak etmiÅŸtir: Ä°nsanlar bir zamanlar enformasyona gerçek hayat ortamlar?n? kendileri yönlendirebilmek amac?yla ihtiyaç duyarken, ÅŸimdilerde, asl?nda hiçbir iÅŸe yaramayan enformasyonlar?n görünüÅŸte yararl? olabileceÄŸi baÄŸlamlar? yaratmak zorunda kalmaktad?rlar.

Question asking is the most important intellectual tool we have.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.

I am particularly fond of John Lindsay's suggestion that political commercials be banned from television as we now ban cigarette and liquor commercials.

Another possible conclusion was expressed by George Bernard Shaw, also about fifty years ago, when he wrote that the average person today is about as credulous as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.

The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself.