Amazing: Ourselves To Death

Amazing
Ourselves to Death
NEIL POSTMAN’S
B R AV E N E W W O R L D
REVISITED
L A N C E S T R AT E
Neil Postman’s most popular work, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), provided an insightful critique
of the effects of television on public discourse in America, arguing that television’s bias towards
entertaining content trivializes serious issues and undermines the basis of democratic culture.
Lance Strate, who earned his doctorate under Neil Postman and is one of the leading media
ecology scholars of our time, re-examines Postman’s arguments, updating his analysis and critique
for the twenty-first-century media environment that includes the expansion of television program-
ming via cable and satellite as well as the Internet, the web, social media, and mobile technologies.
Integrating Postman’s arguments about television with his critique of technology in general,
Strate considers the current state of journalism, politics, religion, and education in American culture.
Strate also contextualizes Amusing Ourselves to Death through an examination of Postman’s life and
career and the field of media ecology that Postman introduced.
This is a book about our prospects for the future, which can only be based on the ways in which
we think and talk about the present.
“When Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is brought into the classroom, or given as a gift, or
handed from one reader to another, a problem is created: into what frame should we place this book?
For that’s how unique it is. Lance Strate has solved that problem by writing a graceful and learned
companion to Postman’s original. It doubles as a biographical sketch of a great man and his intellec-
tual times. It is also an act of love. And if you love the book it’s about, you will be grateful for Strate’s
Amazing Ourselves to Death. I am. And I highly recommend it.” —Jay Rosen, Professor of Journalism,
New York University
“Lance Strate masterfully brings to a new generation, and a new century, Neil Postman’s enligh
tening and essential insights into the ways that our uses of media reflect and reshape our society. He
further shows how we can reclaim control, so we can use the ever-evolving media rather than letting
them use us.” —Deborah Tannen, University Professor and Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown
University
Lance Strate studied with Neil Postman at New York University, where he earned his Ph.D., and
is currently Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. The author
of Echoes and Reflections and On the Binding Biases of Time, he is a recipient of the Media Ecology
Association’s Walter Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship.
www.peterlang.com
Amazing Ourselves to Death
David W. Park
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Vol. 10
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Amazing
Ourselves to Death
NEIL POSTMAN’S
BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED
PETER LANG
New York  Washington, D.C./Baltimore  Bern
Frankfurt  Berlin  Brussels  Vienna  Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Strate, Lance.
Amazing ourselves to death: Neil Postman’s brave new world revisited / Lance Strate.
pages cm. — (A critical introduction to media and communication theory; v. 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mass media—Social aspects. 2. Postman, Neil.
3. Mass media—Influence. 4. Mass media and culture.
5. Communication and technology. 6. Education—Effect of technological innovations on.
7. Media literacy. I. Title. II. Title: Neil Postman’s brave new world revisited.
P95.54S745 302.23—dc23 2013041258
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for my mother, Betty Strate,
for all of her support over the years
contents
Acknowledgments ix
Foreword xi
Part One
Chapter 1. Fatal Amusements 3
Chapter 2. Building a Bridge to Neil Postman 15
Chapter 3. Media Ecology as a Scholarly Activity 43
Chapter 4. The Evolving American Media Environment 59
Part Two
Chapter 5. Breaking the News 85
Chapter 6. The Tribe Has Spoken 101
Chapter 7. Neon Gods 113
Chapter 8. Grand Theft Education 125
Chapter 9. The Tempest 135
References 147
Index 157
acknowledgments
I can only begin by acknowledging Neil Postman, who was my teacher, men-
tor, colleague, and friend, and who continues to serve as a source of inspira-
tion. I would also like to express my gratitude to Neil’s family, especially his
wife Shelley and his son Andrew, for their friendship, assistance, and support
for this project.
I also want to express my appreciation for Neil’s colleagues Terence P.
Moran and the late Christine Nystrom, who was with me in spirit as I worked
on this book. And I owe a debt of gratitude to Ed Wachtel and Joshua Mey-
rowitz as well for encouraging me to apply to Postman’s Media Ecology doc-
toral program back when I was working on my MA, and to my old professors
Gary Gumpert and the late Jack Barwind for introducing me to media ecology
scholars and subject matter. I also want to make special mention of two of my
classmates in the doctoral program, Robert Albrecht and Paul Lippert. And
I would have liked to mention all of Neil’s media ecology students by name,
but I particularly want to acknowledge Mary Alexander, Mary Ann Allison,
Susan B. Barnes, Yariv Ben-Eliezer, Eva Berger, Robert K. Blechman, Cheryl
Casey, Margaret Cassidy, Brian Cogan, Peter Costello, Peter Fallon, Robert
Francos, Thom Gencarelli, Stephanie Gibson, Casey Man Kong Lum, Susan
x amazing ourselves to death
Maushart, John McDaid, Bill Petkanas, Lori Ramos, and Janet Sternberg. Paul
Levinson deserves special mention for his advice, encouragement, and for the
challenge he continually provides in taking a position contrary to that of his
former mentor.
Through the Media Ecology Association, we have carried on the work
begun by Postman and his colleagues, and again I wish I could name everyone
I have come to know through that organization, but I especially want to men-
tion Corey Anton, Stephanie Bennett, Susan J. Drucker, Raymond Gozzi, Jr.,
Fernando Gutiérrez, Donna Halper, Octavio Islas, James C. Morrison, Valerie
Peterson, Phil Rose, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul A. Soukup, SJ, and Edward
Tywoniak. A special thank you as well to Dale Winslow and my NeoPoiesis
colleagues.
In addition to Ed Wachtel and Paul Levinson, I want to express my grat-
itude to my colleagues at Fordham University, including Babette Babich,
Dominic Balestra, Kimberly Casteline, Lewis Freeman, Margot Hardenbergh,
Adeena Karasick, Ron L. Jacobson, Beth Knobel, Tom McCourt, Roberta
Palmiero, our Provost Stephen Freedman, and our President, Joseph M.
McShane, SJ. Perhaps the greatest debt I owe is to my students, and once
again I wish I could name them all, but I particularly want to mention Michael
Plugh and Matt Quayle, for the inspiration they have given me.
I would be remiss if I did not say thank you to David Park and Mary Savigar
of Peter Lang Publishing for proposing I write this book, and for their forbear-
ance as I worked on it.
Finally, thank you to my family for your patience and understanding, to
my children Benjamin and Sarah, to my wife Barbara, and to my mother Betty
Strate.
And to all those who, in my haste, I have forgotten to include here, please
accept my apologies and know that you have my gratitude as well.
foreword
I imagine there are two kinds of readers of this book, those who have already
read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of
Show Business (1985), and those who have not. For those who have not, my
goal is to provide you with a summary of Postman’s arguments concerning the
negative effects of the television medium, and technology more generally, on
public discourse and social institutions, along with a demonstration of their
continued relevance to our contemporary culture and media environment.
I know there are some who inevitably question the value and validity of a
book that is, as of this writing, almost thirty years old, and not getting any
younger, and would perhaps remain unmoved by a reminder that we still study
Plato’s writings from the 4th century BCE. And there is no denying the fact
that Amusing Ourselves to Death does not take into account the Internet, web,
social media, and mobile technology, let alone the explosive growth of pro-
gramming options made available via cable and satellite television, while the
Reagan-era culture that Postman critiques continues to recede into the past.
In presenting you with an updated analysis, I realize that the passage of time
will render my references increasingly less relevant as well. For this reason, my
intent is also to present Postman’s overall approach, grounded in the field of
media ecology, and show how it can continue to be applied in the future. Of
xii amazing ourselves to death
course, if you have not read Amusing Ourselves to Death yet, I hope that this
book will convince you to do so, and enhance your reading when you do.
Readers already familiar with Postman are aware of his exceptional elo-
quence, a standard that I make no claims of approaching. Postman wrote for a
general readership, addressing major issues and concerns of his time, and like
many of his other books, Amusing Ourselves to Death is best understood as an
extended essay, meant to stand on its own. In taking a scholarly approach to
Postman’s work, I have endeavored to relate Amusing Ourselves to Death to
Postman’s other books, especially Technopoly (1992). This is also essential to
the task of updating Postman’s arguments to take into consideration comput-
ers, information technology, and new media, and the proliferation of technol-
ogy in general. I have chosen the title Amazing Ourselves to Death to reflect
this wider scope, and the fact that it is ultimately our innovations in media
and technology that are the cause for considerable concern. The subtitle, Neil
Postman’s Brave New World Revisited, alludes to Aldous Huxley’s set of essays,
Brave New World Revisited (1958), reflections on his novel, Brave New World
(1932), which Postman highlights as prescient in its warnings of a future in
which freedom is sacrificed for the sake of fun. In addition to situating Amus-
ing Ourselves to Death within Postman’s entire body of work, I have further
endeavored to contextualize his arguments through a biographical sketch and
a general discussion of the field of media ecology with which he was associat-
ed. All of these subjects require much fuller treatment than can be accorded
here, but I hope that what I have provided will be a starting point for further
investigation.
At this point, I should probably explain that Neil Postman was my pro-
fessor and mentor, as well as a colleague and friend, and he had a profound
influence on my intellectual development and scholarship. As a graduate stu-
dent, I attended seminars with him as he worked out the ideas that appear
in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and even observed him working on the book,
sitting in a conference room near his office (some of the book was also written
in a Bagel Nosh in the vicinity of Flushing, NY). Postman wrote with a black
felt-tip pen on a yellow pad, and often mouthed the words as he was writing.
When I asked him why, he emphasized the importance of writing for the ear,
rather than the eye, as the key to good writing. I was in the privileged position
of being able to get to know Neil Postman fairly well over the course of about
23 years as well as to work with him on occasion (see, for example, Postman,
Nystrom, Strate, & Weingartner, 1987). And I have published several ar-
ticles about his thought (Strate, 1994, 2003, 2006b, 2006c), and included
foreword xiii
discussions of his legacy in two books I have written, Echoes and Reflections:
On Media Ecology as a Field of Study (2006a), and On the Binding Biases of Time
and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology (2011). I also orga-
nized a symposium entitled Perspectives on Postman held at New York Uni-
versity on April 6, 2006, and edited a special issue of Explorations in Media
Ecology (Vol. 5, No. 1) devoted to his life and work. So when David Park
contacted me about writing a short book about Amusing Ourselves to Death
for his Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory Series for
Peter Lang, it struck me as an offer I could not refuse. I hasten to add that
there are quite a few others, especially among Postman’s former students and
colleagues, who also would have been logical choices to write this book, and
who could have done so as well as if not better than I, and in all probability
would have approached the task differently. And it goes without saying that
Postman himself would have been the best choice to revisit the arguments he
made almost 30 years ago, and if only he were still alive, I would be happy to
turn my pen over to him and let him compose a new commentary with his
characteristic charm, clarity, and intelligence.
Amusing Ourselves to Death was the most popular and influential of the
approximately 25 books Postman authored over the course of his career. It was
not an academic book, although it quickly became required reading for schol-
ars and students throughout the humanities and social sciences. It also has had
a major impact on media practitioners, artists, and intellectuals throughout
the United States, and across the globe. In 1992, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd
fame released a solo album inspired by the book, entitled Amused to Death.
The back cover of the 20th Anniversary Edition of the book includes praise
from Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation, and Matt Groening, creator of
The Simpsons. In a 2007 Wall Street Journal article, former NBC Nightly News
anchor Tom Brokaw included it in his list of the five best books on journalism
(and it was the only book not specifically devoted to news). In a 2012 blog
post, John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, included it in her list of recommend-
ed reading. Alan Kay, one of the inventors of the graphical user interface on
which the Macintosh and Windows operating systems are based, includes the
book on his own recommended reading list along with two others by Postman,
The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) and Conscientious Objections (1988).
Not long after Postman passed away in 2003, his son Andrew spoke to
me and some of his father’s former students about the reception of Amus-
ing Ourselves to Death in our classrooms, particularly among undergraduates;
the responses were included without attribution in the new introduction he
xiv amazing ourselves to death
prepared for the book’s 20th Anniversary Edition, and here is his report on
what I had to say:
A student of Dad’s, a teacher himself, says his own students are more responsive to
Amusing Ourselves to Death, not less, than they were five or ten years ago. “When the
book first came out, it was ahead of its time, and some people didn’t understand its
reach,” he says. “It’s a twenty-first century book published in the twentieth century.”
(Postman, 2005, p. xv).
You may gather, from this comment, that my approach is sympathetic to

Postman’s. Indeed, in thinking about any current development, I think it is
always helpful to pose the question: What would Neil Postman say? And this
question was very much on my mind as I was writing this book, although
I should also note that my position is not identical with Postman’s. What
I have written here reflects my own thinking, and in particular any errors I
have made here are my own, not his. And I will state here at the outset that
there are many positive aspects of our contemporary media environment, that
increased access to information has had democratizing effects, that there is
much to be gained from the breaking down of hierarchical structures and the
elimination of inequalities, that we have available to us more knowledge than
ever before, that we also have access to a larger range of news sources than
ever before, that the quality of television programming has never been better,
that we have many new forms of creative expression available to us, that there
is much to be gained from the ability to connect and collaborate and organize
ourselves that our new media have granted us, and that there is much to be
said for new media’s bias towards enhanced openness and transparency. We
have made great progress in social justice over the past few decades, and we
have also backed away from the constant threat of nuclear annihilation.
We should take pride in our achievements, but this should not absolve us
of our responsibility to continue to strive to make things better. Nor can we
ignore the fact that we still face many grave political, social, and environmen-
tal challenges. As we move forward, we need to engage in critical assessment,
because there is no escaping the fact that our understanding of the world is
mediated by our symbols and technologies, with which we continue to act on
our world, and alter it. Every innovation we adopt is not necessarily one that
will benefit us, while every benefit comes with a cost, and sometimes what is
lost may outweigh what is gained. Postman asks us to think about the price
we pay for our media and technologies, not because he favors a pessimistic
outlook, but because so much attention is given over to their benefits. We
foreword xv
live in a culture of the sales pitch, and we are all too accustomed to delighting
in the products being sold to us, while ignoring the charges being rung up,
unmindful of what we will wind up paying for them later on. But the bill always
comes due in the end. This is true not only for us as consumers influenced by ad-
vertising and marketing, but as citizens shaped by our media and technology.
The price we pay for our innovations is more than monetary, but also includes
the negative effects they may have on our culture and social institutions, on
government, religion, and education, on the ways in which we view and relate
to our world, to other people, and to ourselves. Postman asks us to focus on
the costs in order to balance out the fact that so much attention is given to
the benefits alone. Responsibility begins by asking what is the price, what are
we putting at risk, what will we have to give up, what will we have to sacri-
fice? We need to consider the environmental impact of what we are doing,
not only in relation to the natural environment, but also regarding our social
and cultural environment, and engage in the rational assessment needed to
create and maintain a balanced and healthy society. The task of healing and
repairing our world is far from complete, and it is our responsibility, as human
beings, to help in whatever way we can. I hope that in some small way this
book contributes to that goal.
PART ONE
·1·
fatal amusements
Nero fiddled while Rome burned is an old saying that expresses an essential truth:
Human beings have been known to respond inadequately and inappropriately
to grave occurrences, ignore warnings, and make light of tragedies. As it turns
out, Nero was not actually present in Rome at the time of the Great Fire in
the year 64 CE, and, in any event, fiddles or violins were not invented until
the 16th century, around the time that this adage about Nero first surfaced.
But the value of this maxim lies not with the accuracy of its portrayal of the
fifth Roman Emperor but with its ability to provide us with a popular meta-
phor for irresponsible and foolish action in the face of serious events. Fiddling
while Rome burns has been used in particular to refer to inaction on the part of
political leaders in the face of a crisis. But as citizens in a democracy, respon-
sible for governing ourselves, there are no solo acts when it comes to fiddling
around—we are all playing in the band.
Fiddling While Rome Burns might well have been an alternative title
for Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), which Neil Postman wrote not in
Puritanical condemnation of all pastimes and leisure pursuits, nor as an
elitist screed bemoaning the poor taste of youth today, or the loss of man-
ners or moral standards. The problem that Postman identifies is not that
we seek pleasure or like to have fun. Our amusements are part of what
4 amazing ourselves to death
makes us human, as he readily acknowledges. The problem, instead, is

one of context. In the context of a city on fire, we ought to expect a seri-
ous response from our leaders, not a musical one. In the context of certain
circumstances such as a courtroom trial, religious ceremony, or classroom,
we ought to expect a certain measure of decorum and appropriate behav-
ior, at the very least to prevent their disruption. And in the context of
the vital matters that must be dealt with within a democratic society,
we ought to expect serious discussion and debate as a basis for making
decisions about the present, and the future. Understanding context is at
the core of Postman’s message, an understanding eloquently expressed in
Ecclesiastes (3:1): “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every
purpose under the heaven.”
Postman argues that there is a time for amusement and a time to be se-
rious, and as our media and technology have expanded our ability to amuse
ourselves, we have lost our ability to distinguish between the two, blurring
the boundaries in favor of amusement. As a consequence, we find ourselves
suffering from too much of a good thing. We know quite well that too much
of the food that nourishes us leads to obesity, that too much of the exercise
that strengthens the body can cause damage, and that too large a dose of the
medicine that cures disease can be deadly. The primary value for any eco-
logical system is balance, and Postman identified late 20th-century American
culture as dangerously out of balance. His reference to death in the book’s title
was no mere hyperbole, but an indication that our loss of balance has called
into question the very survival of our culture, of liberal democracy, and even
of humanity as a species.
Neil Postman was criticizing the present, circa early 1980s, but his eye
was on the future. In his collection of essays entitled Conscientious Objections
(1988), Postman included a chapter that summarizes Amusing Ourselves to
Death, and gave it the title “Future Shlock,” a pun on the phrase future shock.
As he explains in the introduction to the piece,
Sometime about the middle of 1963, my colleague Charles Weingartner and

I delivered in tandem an address to the National Council of Teachers of English.
In that address we used the phrase “future shock” as a way of describing the social
paralysis induced by rapid technological change. To my knowledge, Weingartner
and I were the first people ever to use it in a public forum. Of course, neither
Weingartner nor I had the brains to write a book called Future Shock, and all due
credit goes to Alvin Toffler for having recognized a good phrase when one came
along. (p. 162)
fatal amusements 5
Yogi Berra is often credited with saying, the future ain’t what it used to be,
although the quote can be traced back to a 1937 essay by the French poet
and philosopher, Paul Valéry, who wrote, l’avenir est comme le reste: iln’est
plus cequ’il était. While it is true that the future has always held a measure of
uncertainty, what both aphorists recognized was that, in the 20th century, the
future had become almost entirely unpredictable and, consequently, nearly
impossible to plan for. This is what Toffler (1970) meant by future shock, that
the continual acceleration of the rate of change has brought the future into
the present, resulting in a form of psychological disorientation akin to culture
shock. Toffler’s message was that we needed to adjust ourselves to living in a
fast-changing technological environment and the massive social disturbanc-
es that it engendered because, as pioneering video artist Nam June Paik de-
clared, the future is now. But is there much of a difference between saying that
the future is now, and saying that the future is lost to us? Just as Harold Innis
(1951) warned us of the present-centered orientation of western societies (see
also Strate, 2011), Postman wondered whether we are still capable of serious
discussion as to where we are headed, and our prospects for survival as a cul-
ture. “Whereas future shock results in confused, indecisive, and psychically
uprooted people,” Postman (1988) wrote, future shlock is “characterized by the
rapid erosion of collective intelligence” (p. 163), a collective intelligence that
we desperately need if we want to have a future.
Postman’s critique may come across as too negative for some, but when
we lose our direction, what else is there to do but to call for a course cor-
rection? Norbert Wiener (1950, 1961) coined the term cybernetics based
on the Greek word for “steersman” (the same root from which we get the
word “govern”), and following Wiener, Postman (1979) argued that we
need a thermostatic mechanism to restore our lost equilibrium. And as
Gregory Bateson (1972, 1979) explains, the key to the cybernetic func-
tion of maintaining balance is frequent error correction through negative
feedback (see also Deacon, 2012); positive feedback intensifies whatever it
is we are doing, while negative feedback provides, in the language of con-
stitutional law, checks and balances. And whether the tune we imagine
Nero playing was a raucous “Fire on the Mountain” or a sedate rendition of
“Hearts and Flowers,” in the face of such nihilistic soundtracks, Postman
might well have invoked an altogether different, more hopeful musical,
that of Fiddler on the Roof. In the musical, Tevye, the main character, says
of himself and his fellow villagers that, “every one of us is a fiddler on
the roof trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking
his neck.” And he goes on to explain the secret of how they keep from
falling, which is summed up in one word: Tradition! The theme of the
play, however, is the need to cope with change, with modernization. In
the face of events that would have otherwise proven to be entirely demor-
alizing, disorienting, and destabilizing, tradition serves as a much needed
counterweight. Again, context is essential, as under other circumstances
an unchecked emphasis on tradition might lead to a rigid, inflexible cul-
ture unable to adapt to changing circumstances. This had been Postman’s
concern at an earlier time, notably when he collaborated with Charles
Weingartner on Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969).
Postman’s ideal of cultural balance is generally not seen as a utopian
vision, and he would probably resist such a characterization, but the goal of
utopia need not be a state of frozen perfection, but rather that of a sane and
healthy society (Fuller, 1969). And while the term utopian is frequently used
in a pejorative sense to connote something that is impractical and inappro-
priately idealistic (as in the phrase utopian scheme), it can also indicate a fun-
damental desire to improve the human condition, as Lewis Mumford (1922)
relates: “The more that men react upon their environment and make it over
after a human pattern, the more continuously do they live in utopia” (p. 11).
For Mumford, achieving utopia was not a matter of mechanization, industrial-
ism, and technological progress. Rather, taking his lead from William Morris’s
19th-century novel News from Nowhere, Mumford viewed utopia in terms of
political, economic, social, and moral progress, and a restoration of a more
human and organic way of life. The essence of the idea of utopia is the ability
to look forward to the future, to believe in the possibility of building a bet-
ter world than the one we currently live in. Mumford’s (1934, 1967, 1970)
hopeful outlook, as well as his powerful criticism of mechanization, played a
significant role in shaping Postman’s positions on media and technology.
Thinking about the future, and thinking about the way that we think
about the future can be challenging. Our contemporary present-centered
orientation is directly related to the electronic media’s emphasis on speed
and immediacy (Strate, 2011), while our unprecedented ability to produce
and reproduce visual images has resulted in what Jacques Ellul (1985) called
the humiliation of the word. And for most of the time our species has been in
existence, we have focused on tradition, the preservation and conservation
of knowledge, and therefore have primarily oriented ourselves in relation to
the past. Before the invention of writing, with no means of preserving knowl-
edge beyond the limits of collective memory, there was a natural bias against
fatal amusements 7
novelty and innovation (Goody, 1977; Havelock, 1963, 1986; McLuhan,

1962; Ong, 1967, 1982). Time was understood to be cyclical rather than lin-
ear, and oral societies looked back towards a golden age, longing for its res-
toration (Eliade, 1954; Kirk, 1970, 1975). The introduction of writing made
possible the keeping of records and calendars, and with them the beginnings
of a linear conception of time, as well as a steady accumulation of knowledge.
The invention of the alphabet was associated with the earliest forms of written
history, narratives describing events unfolding in linear progression, emerging
in the West first from ancient Israel, then Greece. The shift from tradition as
an overriding value to a forward-looking belief in progress did not fully take
hold until the printing revolution in early modern Europe (Eisenstein, 1979),
which ushered in what we refer to as the modern era. Print culture fostered
the accelerated development of science and technology, which included the
invention of the steam engine in the late 18th century, leading to the Indus-
trial Revolution.
The story of utopias parallels these developments, beginning with Plato’s
Republic written in the 4th century BCE, a product of the literate culture of an-
cient Greece. Thomas More’s fictional work Utopia (1516) was published less
than a century after Gutenberg’s invention, while works appearing during the
industrial era include Samuel Butler’s satiric novel Erewhon (1872), Edward
Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), and the aforementioned News from
Nowhere (1890), Morris’s response to Bellamy. The utopian imagination is
generally associated with an optimistic outlook, but a future orientation could
also be coupled with a critical perspective, and it was also during the industrial
era that a term denoting utopia’s opposite was coined, dystopia, introduced by
John Stuart Mill in an 1868 speech to the English Parliament. Dystopian lit-
erature emerged early in the 20th century, cautionary tales extrapolating into
the future to warn that we were headed in the wrong direction. In contrast to
the current fascination with stories about the collapse of civilization, whether
due to nuclear war, an epidemic, alien invasion, supernatural intervention,
or the ever-popular zombie apocalypse, dystopian narratives depicted a future
where progress results in a severe loss of human freedom, scientific advances
lead to unprecedented forms of dehumanization, and technological innova-
tion makes possible totalitarian control on the part of the state.
The best-known example of the dystopian genre was published in 1949
by George Orwell, and his decision to give his novel the title 1984 invested
that year with great symbolic power. Not surprisingly then, when the actu-
al year 1984 came around, there was a great deal of discussion concerning
Orwell’s dystopia, and a great deal of celebration that his nightmare vision of
the future had not come to pass. For example, Apple Computer promised in a
Super Bowl commercial appearing on January 24th of that year: “On January
24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984
won’t be like 1984.” It was against this backdrop that Postman wrote much of
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). While agreeing that America in 1984 did
not resemble Orwell’s dystopia, he instead argued that we were sliding towards
another type of dystopia, the one depicted by Aldous Huxley in Brave New
World (1932). But while Postman was writing against Orwell in this sense,
I think it is important to note that he had the greatest respect for Orwell as a
writer (see, for example, Postman, 1988), and was particularly fond of Orwell’s
nonfiction essays, notably “Politics and the English Language” (1946), which
critiques the actual misuse of language that forms the basis of the fictional
portrayal in 1984. In Orwell’s dystopia, a totalitarian government sought to
annihilate human freedom through all manner of coercion, constant surveil-
lance, total propaganda, and various psychological methods whose aim was no
less than thought control. He introduced the term doublethink, which referred
to the ability to hold and fully accept contradictory opinions or beliefs simul-
taneously without suffering any cognitive dissonance whatsoever, the primary
examples being the Party’s slogans: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Igno-
rance is Strength. The more commonly used term doublespeak was coined after
the publication of 1984 and reflects Orwell’s own influence on English vocab-
ulary, as well as his concern over language used to mislead and manipulate. It
is worth noting that the National Council of Teachers of English established
a Doublespeak Award in 1974 for use of deceptive language and the following
year added a George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Hones-
ty and Clarity in Language, which in 1986 was presented to Neil Postman for
Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Orwell used the term doublethink rather than doublespeak because he was
drawing on the idea that language gives us our tools for thought, thereby playing
a significant role in our understanding of our world and ourselves. His Appendix
to 1984, entitled “The Principles of Newspeak,” elaborates on this view:
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the
ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. … The purpose of Newspeak was
not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits
proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Old-
speak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles
fatal amusements 9
of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on

words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle ex-
pression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while
excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect
methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by elim-
inating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox
meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single
example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such
statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not
be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and in-
tellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity
nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of
vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with
was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the
range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of
words down to a minimum. (pp. 246–247)
As a thought experiment, Newspeak represents a practical (albeit highly

unethical) application of the linguistic relativism associated with Edward
Sapir (1921), Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956), Dorothy Lee (1959), and others,
but one that reflects the actual manipulations of language on the part of to-
talitarian governments (Mueller, 1973; see also Arendt, 2004). In addition
to what was known about Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union,
Orwell also drew upon his own observation and experience of how liberal
democracies such as Britain and the United States behaved during wartime.
Given this understanding of how language influences the way we think and
view the world, there is a certain irony in the fact that Orwell’s choice of
the year 1984 was taken as prophecy rather than an arbitrary designation.
After all, Orwell composed 1984 in 1948, and simply reversed the last two
digits of the year to arrive at his title and time frame, and Orwell’s main
character, Winston Smith, tells the reader that he is not even sure that the
year is 1984. Celebrating the fact that 1984 was nothing like 1984 would be
an example of what Postman (1976) called stupid talk, much like a similar
example he cited:
In order to realign the calendar to coincide with the astronomical facts, the British
government decreed that September 2 [1752] would henceforth be September 14. This
decree was followed by a great hue and cry from the public, which held that such a
change would deprive everyone of 11 days of their lives! That is an example of stupid
talk, not unlike the reasoning of the person who, upon being told that the thermometer
outside the window read 98 degrees, remarked, “No wonder it’s so hot!” (p. 141)
We can be grateful, at least, that the celebration and self-congratulation that

marked the year 1984 eventually subsided. Now that we are in the 21st cen-
tury, 1984 continues to serve as a symbol, and a warning; renewed interest
in the novel and film adaptation followed the 2013 revelations by former
CIA employee Edward Snowden regarding US government surveillance of its
citizens, prompting President Obama to deny that the government is acting
like Big Brother, 1984’s personification of government control. And Postman
would not dismiss these concerns out of hand, pointing to the social impact of
the electronic media and information technologies and what James Beniger
(1986) called the control revolution, along with the totalitarian implications
of what Ellul (1964, 1965) referred to as the technological society and Postman
(1992) dubbed technopoly, as well as the ways in which language is used to
deceive and manipulate.
Postman’s criticism in Amusing Ourselves to Death was aimed not at Or-
well but at the smug, self-satisfied rhetoric that greeted the arrival of the year
1984. To that end, he opened Amusing Ourselves to Death by observing that
while everyone was focused on Orwell, they had overlooked the fact that
Huxley’s Brave New World had proven to be the more prophetic of the two,
at least in regard to western societies. Whereas Orwell’s dystopia was based on
oppression and suppression, imposing strict discipline and regimentation and
complete control of every aspect of life, Huxley’s hedonistic society used sex,
drugs, and entertainment to keep individuals in line. Huxley himself recog-
nized the distinction between the two works, writing in the opening chapter
of Brave New World Revisited (1958):
George Orwell’s 1984 was a magnified projection into the future of a present that
had contained Stalinism and an immediate past that had witnessed the flowering
of Nazism. Brave New World was written before the rise of Hitler to supreme
power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride. In
1931 systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had
become in 1948, and the future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good
deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell.
In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after
all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia and
recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell’s book of some
of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of
everybody’s predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can
somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the
odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something
like 1984. (pp. 2–3)
fatal amusements 11
Huxley may be forgiven for politely favoring his own view of the future over
Orwell’s, and it is also worth noting that he published a darker view of the
future in his novel Ape and Essence in 1948, and depicted a utopian society in
the last work of fiction he published, i.e., Island (1962). These other works were
nowhere near as popular as Brave New World, however, and comparisons with
1984 became commonplace almost from the moment that Orwell’s best known
work was published. I should add that assignments to that effect were part of the
New York City public school curriculum when I was in junior high school in the
early 70s. But even if Postman’s (1985) take on the dueling dystopias was not
the first to be written, it is arguably the most eloquent ever published:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that
there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to
read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared
those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth
would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive
culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some
equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley
remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists “failed
to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley
added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are con-
trolled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us.
Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. (pp. vii–viii)
And in the concluding chapter of Amusing Ourselves to Death, aptly entitled

“The Huxleyan Warning,” Postman (1985) writes
What Huxley teaches us is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devasta-
tion is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose
countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does
not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or
gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when
cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public
conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an au-
dience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk;
culture-death is a clear possibility. (pp. 155–156)
Postman uses Huxley’s dystopia as a jumping-off point for issuing his own
warning about the effects of television on American culture. His essential ar-
gument is that television, as a medium, favors content that takes the form of
entertainment, thereby ushering in the age of show business. Even serious topics
tend to be presented in an entertaining format on television, and this results
in their trivialization, and our own inability, as citizens, to deal with them in
an effective manner. Moreover, insofar as television constitutes the dominant
medium of American culture, all other media tend to conform to its biases. The
American republic, and indeed modern liberal democracy as a whole, was born
out of Enlightenment rationalism and the ideal of a free exchange of ideas. Pub-
lic discourse, the open discussion of the vital matters that we are faced with as a
society, constitutes the cornerstone of democratic government, and is based on
modes of communication that emerged within literate cultures, and especially
followed the printing revolution that began in the 15th century. For Postman
(1999), print culture and the Enlightenment are not a utopian ideal, but do
represent the foundation for a society wherein people can work together to “re-
act upon their environment and make it over after a human pattern” to invoke
Mumford’s (1922, p. 11) more measured conception of utopia. But television’s
ascendancy and the postliterate culture associated with it represent for Postman
a change in direction towards a dystopian future.
But Postman’s emphasis on pleasure, entertainment, and television in Amus-
ing Ourselves to Death is only half of the story. Huxley’s dystopia is also a society
that worships technology in all of its forms. Written less than two decades after
the introduction of the assembly line, at a time when the inventor Henry Ford
was possibly the most admired individual in America, Brave New World present-
ed a future in which mass production techniques had been applied to human
reproduction, so that natural conception and childbirth no longer occurred,
and test tube babies were grown in factories, molded into certain preset intel-
ligences, with unskilled labor contentedly carried out by mentally challenged
Epsilons, while leadership roles went to highly developed Alphas. Genetic en-
gineering was supplemented by psychological indoctrination and medication—
anticipating Prozac Nation (Wurtzel, 1995)—along with the ready availability
of many forms of pleasure, to create a fully integrated, efficiently functioning
society as devoid of freedom as Orwell’s gulag-like world.
In Huxley’s novel, people prayed to our Ford instead of our Lord, and the
crucifix and cross were replaced by the sign of the T, a reference to the first
product to be produced via assembly line, Henry Ford’s Model T car. And
while we now consider our society to be postindustrial and our means of
production to be post-Fordist, the important point is that Huxley’s dystopia
is very much the kind of society that Postman discussed in Technopoly: The
Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992). It is a society in which technology
fatal amusements 13
holds a monopoly on the culture, and there are few if any brakes placed on
innovation. It is a society out of balance, and with no sense of tradition, no
values other than technology itself, for its own sake. Living in a technopoly,
technologies like television are given free rein, and thereby gain great power
to shape and reshape our worldviews and ways of life and, in doing so, rein-
force the technological imperative. As much as efficiency and entertainment
may seem at odds, our emphasis on entertainment is a result of the massive
efficiencies of communication made possible by the electronic media. They, in
turn, serve the cause of efficiency by integrating individuals into the techno-
logical society, performing the function that Jacques Ellul (1965) calls socio-
logical propaganda and promoting technology as a value system.
·2·
building a bridge to
neil postman
It is not unusual for readers to gain an inaccurate impression of what an au-

thor is like from reading his book. In contrast to face-to-face communication,
writing takes language out of a particular context of time and space. In doing
so, it gives our words a degree of permanence they would not otherwise ob-
tain, but at the cost of not only the present as a situation involving immediate
and direct communication, but also the presence of a living, breathing human
being. As Plato (1973) explained over two millennia ago, writing is an imper-
sonal form of communication, as it removes the person and to a large degree
the personality from the message. Written documents render language in an
abstract and decontextualized form as well as one that is lacking in interactiv-
ity, unresponsive, as the authors are not present and may no longer be alive
to answer questions and explain and elaborate upon their meaning. In the
absence of the author and in response to the decontextualization of language,
the reader is forced to recontextualize the message through a process of inter-
pretation, and the result of that process may be quite different from what the
author intended to convey. Along with Plato’s other criticisms, that a written
message may be read by readers for whom it was never intended (increas-
ing the likelihood of misinterpretation), and that writing will weaken mem-
ory by making memorization unnecessary, allowing individuals to give the
appearance of being knowledgeable about a subject without actually having

acquired that knowledge, we can also note the written word’s overriding ad-
vantages. In separating the knower from the known, as Eric Havelock (1963)
put it, writing provides us with a degree of distance and a measure of objec-
tivity, allowing us the freedom to criticize and evaluate statements, claims,
and ideas on their own terms. This is why Postman favored discourse shaped
by the biases of literacy and typography as his ideal form, and he intended for
each of his publications to stand (or fall) based on their own merits.
Be that as it may, there is value in understanding that authors are con-
crete human beings, products of a particular time and place, addressing the
circumstances within which they find themselves, rather than the abstract
authorities they may seem to be through the mediation of the printed word.
And it can aid our understanding of the message an author is trying to convey
to place a written work within the larger context of an author’s life and career,
as I will do in this brief biographical sketch. And let me begin by noting that
readers occasionally come away from reading Amusing Ourselves to Death with
the impression that Postman was some kind of curmudgeon or elitist snob. On
the contrary, he was, ironically some might say, quite amusing and fun-lov-
ing, as well as good-natured, and outgoing. Postman was, to invoke a cliché,
a people person. He loved conversation, and it did not make much difference
if the person he was talking to was the president of the United States (as he
had occasion to speak with Bill Clinton) or a janitor or taxi driver. Postman
had a knack for charming most everyone he encountered, and he excelled at
asking people questions, drawing them out and getting them to talk, a talent
that also made him an outstanding educator. For Postman, face-to-face com-
munication was primary, whether it was in the classroom, in public speaking,
or in informal conversation. Of course, he also took great pride in his career
as an author, and enjoyed being quoted in newspapers and magazines and ap-
pearing on radio and television. But first and foremost he was a teacher and a
colleague, and a friend and a family man.
Neil Postman’s life is of sufficient interest and accomplishment to mer-
it a full-length biography, but within the scope of this chapter, I can only
provide a brief overview, drawing on material that has been previously pub-
lished by myself (Strate, 1994, 2003, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2011) and others
(Frommer & Frommer, 1995; Gencarelli, 2000, 2006a, 2006b; Lum, 2006;
Postman, 2003), and through personal conversation with his wife, Shelley
Postman. Postman’s grandparents came to the United States in the late 19th
century as part of the great wave of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe,
building a bridge to neil postman 17
and his parents were born in New York City and grew up on Manhattan’s
Lower East Side. Postman was born on March 8, 1931, and grew up in the
Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a Jewish neighborhood that produced the likes
of Woody Allen, Isaac Asimov, Lauren Bacall, Mel Brooks, Danny Kaye, San-
dy Koufax, Norman Mailer, Zero Mostel, Maurice Sendak, Barbra Streisand,
and Henny Youngman. It was a multilingual neighborhood, where languages
such as German, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Lithuanian, and Russian were
spoken, and Yiddish served as a lingua franca. Postman had some knowledge
of Yiddish, and also learned Hebrew as part of his religious training, as he
explains in an oral history interview conducted by two of his former students:
My parents were not religious in an organized sense, although they went to shul on
the High Holidays. But they sent me to Hebrew school from the age of five because
the teacher, who lived in our building, was very poor. It was a good deed, a form of
tzedaka. (Frommer & Frommer, 1995, p. 188)
Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that he developed an

awareness of the power of language at an early age. Moreover, while Brook-
lyn was known for its famous Brooklyn accent, public school education at
that time placed a great deal of emphasis on proper grammar and diction, so
that he learned to speak in the manner and idiom of the educated New York
elite of his day. Public school also instilled in him an abiding appreciation for
American democracy, one that he had no trouble reconciling with his ethnic
and religious heritage, as he explained:
I grew up learning to love the American Creed while at the same time being inspired by
a more “tribal” story, to which I had (and still have) considerable attachment. As the
child of Jewish parents, I was required to go to two schools: the American public school,
in which the names of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Tom Paine, and Lincoln were
icons, and a “Jewish” school, in which the names Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca,
Jacob, Rachel, Leah, and Moses were equally sacred. (Postman, 1995, pp. 14–15)
Assimilation was the goal for all immigrant communities at this time, with
schooling as the vehicle by which children would learn how to be fully Amer-
ican, and this also meant maintaining a degree of reticence about your ethnic
identity. For Jewish Americans, this was further intensified by the Second
World War, and the Holocaust, as Postman explained,
Around the time I was eight years old, I began to hear about Jews in Europe being
punished, if not killed. My childhood had been quite idyllic except for this major
thing: the war and the Holocaust, and I’m lumping the two together. It was fright-
ening to know that you could be killed not for anything bad that you did but just
because you were Jewish. (Frommer & Frommer, 1995, p. 117)
Postman (1988, p. 43) mentions that an aunt and uncle of his were killed in
the Dachau concentration camp, but these were distant events. While the
U.S. mobilized and maintained a state of alert on the home front, the threat
was not immediate, and growing up in an ethnic enclave in New York City
provided a good measure of security. It follows that, as he explains,
In my day, you would never deny that you were Jewish, but there was the sort of
attitude that the outside world doesn’t have to know. You don’t have to make a big
deal over it. You’re at school to do what the teacher says, to become an American.
You don’t have to talk about Shabbos, Chanukah. That’s our business. (Frommer &
Frommer, 1995, p. 230)
There was no question of Neil Postman’s Jewish identity for those of us

who knew him personally, and he would make reference to his religious
and ethnic background when he was teaching and in informal conversation.
In more formal communications, such as public speaking and publication,
however, he often refrained from such self-disclosure, as he wanted to com-
municate to Americans as an American. The fact that his Judaism was at
best unclear to his readers was brought home to me not too long after the
publication of Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985. I was searching through
different radio stations when I chanced upon a religious broadcast in which
a preacher was explaining the book to his audience, and when he arrived
at the topic of religion and televangelism, he said, “Now, I’m not sure if
Postman is a Christian…” This comment was indicative of his successful
projection of a nondenominational public persona, and a colleague of mine
recently confessed that she actually had assumed he was Protestant based on
his statement that he was “a member of the Commission on Theology, Ed-
ucation and the Electronic Media of the National Council of the Churches
of Christ” (p. 124).
As for his own religious practice, Postman was not especially observant as
an adult, but he and his wife were affiliated with a Reform congregation while
their children were growing up, and in the eulogy he delivered on behalf of
his father, Andrew Postman (2003) related that, “my dad loved being Jewish,”
adding that, “my father loved taking walks, especially on Jewish holidays,”
and also began by noting,
No one gave more poignant eulogies than my father. If you didn’t know the person
he was eulogizing well, and even if you did, by the time my dad was done illuminat-
ing and celebrating what their lives meant, you wept partly for yourself, because you
wished you’d known the deceased even better. My dad eulogized his mom, our mom’s
mom, our mom’s dad, his aunt, and numerous others. People would line up after his
eulogies to ask if he might be able to squeeze them in to do their eulogy.
Although he was critical of religious zealotry and extremism, Postman’s up-

bringing instilled in him an appreciation for religious discourse and a respect
for the positive qualities of all religions, in particular their ability to provide
narratives that address the question of how we should live our lives. For
many years, Postman gave a lecture to his graduate students on “how to live
the rest of your life” which combined genuine advice with Postman’s typical
sense of humor, and a version of that lecture was reconstructed by Janet
Sternberg (2006a) from notes she had taken, and includes the following
recommendation:
Take religion more seriously than you have.
Religion is one of the few social institutions that have continuity. Moreover, religion
addresses the most interesting issues available to an intelligent human mind. For in-
stance, science asks how, but religion asks why. And if you are Jewish, do not attend
bar mitzvahs where they serve chopped liver molded in the form of a duck. (p. 158)
Apart from learning the distinction between the sacred and the profane,
Postman’s intellectual development benefited from the experience of maintain-
ing a separation between private ethnic identity and public national identity, as
this helped him to observe his culture as an outsider and insider simultaneously.
Also, being exposed to different languages and writing systems while growing
up provided a strong foundation for his development of the field of media
ecology, as did living through the introduction of the television medium.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President of the United States
before Postman turned two years old and died in office when Postman was
fourteen, and this, along with FDR’s New Deal policies, gave Postman his
political foundation. Like most New Yorkers, Postman maintained a strong
loyalty to the Democratic Party. Through his wife’s family, he was introduced
to the Workmen’s Circle, an organization that combined Jewish culture with
socialist politics, an approach that he found interesting, albeit one he never
fully embraced. While at times his views moved further to the left, notably
during the late sixties and early seventies, he was never entirely comfortable
with radical politics; during the eighties, he briefly served on the editorial
board of the flagship magazine of the left, The Nation, at the behest of his
old friend Victor Navasky, editor of the periodical, but he resigned out of
ideological disagreement. By the end of the seventies, Postman had adopted
the culturally conservative position that is evident in Amusing Ourselves to
Death, and some thought it signaled a reversal of political views, but in truth
he remained a staunch liberal for his entire life, and his final books (Postman,
1995, 1999) stand as a defense of the ideals of American democracy as an
expression of Enlightenment rationalism.
Andrew Postman said of his father that he knew “how to live a serious
life in a not so serious way,” and the roots of his playful attitude can be traced
back to his early family life as the youngest of four children. It also was evi-
dent in his keen interest in sports as a child, and Postman in fact excelled at
athletics, playing on the Midwood High School basketball team in New York,
establishing himself in college as a record-setting star athlete on the varsity
basketball team at the State University of New York at Fredonia, where he
earned his BA degree in 1953; he later briefly played minor league baseball
for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Of course, there is a time for playfulness, and a time
to be serious, a fact that Postman understood when he served in the United
States Army during the Korean War. He was fortunate not to be sent overseas,
and while he took pride in his service, he also recognized the injustice of war,
and this informed his antiwar stance during the Vietnam era.
Postman met his future wife Shelley in 1951, and they were married in
1955. He earned his doctorate in education at Columbia University’s Teach-
ers College in 1958. During that time, his mentor, Louis Forsdale, introduced
him to the formal study of linguistics, to the fields of education and commu-
nication, and to the study of media. Forsdale also introduced Postman and his
classmates, including his future co-author, Charles Weingartner, to Marshall
McLuhan, the University of Toronto English professor who would become
famous during the 1960s for his study of media; in nearly all of Postman’s
books, he makes reference to McLuhan’s singular influence on his thought.
After completing his doctorate, Postman joined the English faculty at San
Francisco State College, where he worked under the well-known scholar, S. I.
Hayakawa (Hayakawa would later go on to become president of the college,
and then served a term as a United States senator for California), and through
him, became familiar with the discipline of general semantics.
As a native New Yorker, Postman was not entirely happy about moving to
California, and living so far away from his family, and when a position opened
up at New York University for the following year, the Postmans moved back
east. Shelley Postman informs me that while they were living in San Fran-
cisco, they had one of the clocks in their apartment set to Eastern Standard
Time. In the aforementioned lecture to his students on how to live the rest
of your life (Sternberg, 2006a, p. 154), Postman always began by advising,
“do not go to live in California.” This was always guaranteed to generate a
good deal of laughter, and here is his elaboration on that point, derived from
Sternberg’s notes:
As the playwright Neil Simon and others have discovered, California is a culture of
sunbathers who have left their families and have obliterated their origins in return
for the pleasure of playing tennis all year round. Thus, they are a people who are at
their best only when the going is good. Furthermore, you may think of California as
a metaphor of the communication revolution in America, because they both stress
a love of novelty and experimentation, while rejecting tradition, continuity, history,
family, and culture itself. (p. 154)
Although Postman identifies Las Vegas as the city that serves as our contem-
porary “metaphor of our national character and aspiration” in Amusing Our-
selves to Death (1985, p. 3), much of his critique is indeed aimed at Hollywood,
and in Technopoly (1992) at Silicon Valley. I hasten to add that while he was
known to make humorous put-downs of California on a number of occasions
(the put-down being a common feature of New York culture), they were never
meant to be taken very seriously, and always delivered in a joking manner.
Postman moved back to New York City in 1959, taking up residence in
Flushing, Queens, where he and Shelley later raised three children, Marc,
Andrew, and Madeline. And he remained at New York University in the
School of Education for the remainder of his career. He had been hired for
his expertise in linguistics, in which he was particularly influenced by the lin-
guistic relativism of Edward Sapir (1921) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956),
which suggests that different languages represent different ways of encod-
ing, understanding, and experiencing the world, and comprise different sets
of tools for thinking, feeling, perceiving, and acting. This became known as
the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and was in turn extended to all of culture by
Edward T. Hall (1959), and to media by Edmund Carpenter (1960) and, as
Forsdale (1981) emphasized, by McLuhan (1964). In linguistics, this perspec-
tive was driven underground until recently by Noam Chomsky (1972) and
his followers, although Postman himself did not find the two perspectives in-
compatible. But Postman also drew upon the philosophical work on symbolic
form of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell (1925–1927), Ernst

Cassirer (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1961, 1963), and Susanne K. Langer
(1953, 1957), while the more pragmatic general semantics of Alfred Korzybski
(1993), S. I. Hayakawa (see Hayakawa & Hayakawa, 1990), and Wendell
Johnson (1946) fit neatly within his orientation. Significantly, Postman’s ear-
ly scholarship focused on English education, and he was strongly influenced
by the literary scholarship of I. A. Richards (1929, 1936; Ogden & Richards,
1923), as well as the educational theories of John Dewey (Dewey, 1933, 1938;
Ames & Dewey, 1960).
Postman’s central argument in his early work was that the English cur-
riculum in elementary and secondary schools could be improved through
the incorporation of linguistics and semantics, as well as the study of the new
languages, a phrase that McLuhan’s colleague Edmund Carpenter (1960)
introduced to refer to the media of communication. Postman’s first book,
Television and the Teaching of English, was commissioned by the National
Council of Teachers of English, and lists the NCTE’s Committee on the
Study of Television (which Forsdale chaired) as co-author. Published in
1961, the book serves as a guide to “television education” to help English
teachers “to think and teach about television as an educational and cultural
medium” (p. 1); this type of effort is what would later be termed media lit-
eracy. Postman then went on to develop a textbook series called “The New
English,” used in grades 7 to 12. Published between 1963 and 1967 under
the titles Discovering Your Language (Postman, Morine, & Morine, 1963),
The Uses of Language (Postman & Damon, 1965a), Exploring Your Language
(Postman, 1966), The Languages of Discovery (Postman & Damon, 1965b),
Language and Systems (Postman & Damon, 1965c), and Language and Re-
ality (Postman, 1967), this highly innovative series became quite popular
in classrooms across the United States, and introduced a generation of stu-
dents to the study of symbolic communication and media.
Postman’s first collaborative effort with Charles Weingartner provided
the theoretical context behind his textbook series. Entitled Linguistics: A Rev-
olution in Teaching (1966), the book presented a scholarly synthesis especially
for the benefit of English teachers. Postman’s calls for a new approach to En-
glish education fit together with the growing movement for educational re-
form during the 1960s, and the publication of Teaching as a Subversive Activity
(1969, also co-authored with Weingartner) catapulted Postman into a lead-
ership position in the movement. Combining linguistics, general semantics,
and McLuhan’s ideas about media, and criticizing the American educational
system in general, not just the teaching of English, Postman and Weingartner
called for a curriculum based on the “Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski-Ames-Einstein-
Heisenberg-Wittgenstein-McLuhan-et al. Hypothesis … that language is not
merely a vehicle of expression, it is also the driver; and that what we perceive,
and therefore can learn, is a function of our languaging processes” (p. 101).
Understanding language (including the new languages of media) was central
to this new model of education. Teachers would emphasize the art of asking
questions and what Postman and Weingartner called “the inquiry method”
(p. 25), which included the evaluation of statements or as they put it, “crap
detecting” (p. 1). Teaching as a Subversive Activity had a dramatic impact on
the educational reform movement and remains influential to this day. Post-
man and Weingartner produced two additional books on education, The Soft
Revolution: A Student Handbook for Turning Schools Around (1971) and The
School Book: For People Who Want to Know What All the Hollering Is About
(1973). They also co-edited with Terence P. Moran (a graduate student of
Postman’s who became his colleague at New York University) the anthology,
Language in America (1969); Postman contributed a chapter on the misuse of
language entitled “Demeaning of Meaning,” in which he presented an argu-
ment that would become central to Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985):
In considering the ecology of the semantic environment, we must take into account
what is called the communications revolution. The invention of new and various
media of communication has given a voice and an audience to many people whose
opinions would otherwise not have been solicited, and who, in fact, have little if
anything to contribute to public issues. Many of these people are entertainers, such as
Johnny Carson, Hugh Downs, Joey Bishop, David Susskind, Ronald Reagan, Barbara
Walters, and Joe Garagiola. Before the communications revolution, their public ut-
terances would have been limited exclusively to sentences composed by more knowl-
edgeable people, or they would have had no opportunity to make public utterances
at all. Things being what they are, the press and air waves are filled with the featured
and prime-time sentences of people who are in no position to render informed judg-
ments on what they are talking about: like Joey Bishop on the sociological impli-
cations of drugs, Johnny Carson on education innovation, Ronald Reagan on the
Pueblo incident, David Susskind on anything, and Hugh Downs on menopause. (“It
is,” he says, “a controversial subject.”) (p. 14)
Postman embraced the metaphor of ecology in his thinking, and formally in-
troduced the phrase media ecology in an address given on November 29, 1968,
at the 58th annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English
in Milwaukee. The title of his address was “Growing Up Relevant,” and it
was delivered as part of a program session entitled Media Ecology: The English
of the Future (the other participant was Frank Manchel of the University of
Vermont, who spoke on the topic of “Tomorrow’s Literacy”). A revised ver-
sion of Postman’s address was published in 1970 as a book chapter under the
title of “The Reformed English Curriculum” in an anthology entitled High
School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, edited
by Alvin C. Eurich. Postman introduced media ecology not as a descriptive
phrase, but as the name of a new field of study that he proposed as a replace-
ment for high school English (a modest proposal that, to my knowledge, did
not put any English teachers out of work). And he took credit only for the
name, stating that, “the first thing to be said about media ecology is that I am
not inventing it. I am only naming it” (p. 161). He then went on to declare
that there were approximately 12 media ecologists who were no longer alive,
and specifically named the scholars Harold Innis, Norbert Wiener, and Alfred
North Whitehead, as well as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and the utopian
novelist Edward Bellamy. And he added that there are at least 20 living me-
dia ecologists, specifically naming Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Jacques
Ellul, Buckminster Fuller, Peter Drucker, Edmund Carpenter, Edward T. Hall,
David Riesman, Harold Lasswell, Herman Kahn, Don Fabun, and the science
fiction writer, Ray Bradbury. Some of these names would soon vanish from
Postman’s accounting of the field, such as Lasswell, Kahn, Fabun, Bradbury,
and Bellamy, while other more significant individuals would be added, includ-
ing Lewis Mumford, Eric Havelock, Susanne K. Langer, Elizabeth Eisenstein,
and Erving Goffman. For Postman, media ecology was a work in progress, but
always dominated by what he would consider to be great thinkers, the authors
of great books. And to this day, often the best way to answer the question of
“what” is media ecology is to answer the question of “who” is media ecology.
In his initial discussion, Postman (1970) defined media ecology as “the
study of media as environments,” explaining that the main concern is with
how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and

value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of sur-
vival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content,
and impact on people. (p. 161)
Here too Postman emphasized the concept of inquiry, describing media ecol-
ogy as “a field of inquiry,” and explaining that “fields of inquiry imply the
active pursuit of knowledge. Discoveries. Explorations. Uncertainty. Change.
New questions. New methods. New terms. New definitions” (Postman, 1970,
p. 163). Additionally, just as the art of asking good questions is central to his
inquiry method, he explains that each of the scholars he introduced as media
ecologists
is asking the kinds of questions that are characteristic of media ecology. For example,
their questions have to do with the present and the future. Mostly the future. Their
questions also have to do with our chances of survival, and how to prepare ourselves
intellectually and emotionally for media environments most of us do not believe in
and which we may not be able to control. (p. 161)
For Postman, media ecology would be more than just a theory or hypothesis or
philosophical school—it would hold practical value of great significance. And
although the field of media ecology did not become the basis of high school
education, Postman was able to design a graduate program in media ecology
at New York University, which was accepted in 1970 and officially launched
in 1971. “A Prospectus for a Ph.D. Program in Media Ecology” was included
in Postman and Weingartner’s The Soft Revolution (1971, pp. 139–146), with
the invitation: “Local catalogues please copy” (p. 139), reflecting an openness
characteristic of the times, but also of Postman’s personal ethos. The field of
media ecology is defined there as “the study of transactions among people,
their messages, and their message systems” (p. 139), and it is presented as a
form of praxis. Making reference to Ralph Nader’s consumer advocacy, par-
ticularly in regard to the automobile industry, supported as it was by young
professionals who became known as Nader’s Raiders, Postman wrote:
Suppose we could somehow mobilize the talent and energy of graduate students to
provide our nation’s first line of defense against ignorance and charlatanism. Sup-
pose there were counterparts to Nader’s Raiders in every university in the country—
students whose graduate training consisted of doing systematic investigations into
public problems and of communicating the results to the widest possible audience.
Suppose this could be done even in one university. What would it be like? (Postman
& Weingartner, 1971, p. 139)
The answer, of course, was the media ecology program that Postman founded
with Terence P. Moran, who relates
I was present at the conception, birth, incunabula, and young adulthood of the pro-
gram’s life. From my perspective, the development was not so much due to careful
planning but to a deliberate, even gleeful, rejection of traditional academic approach-
es to understanding human communication. We committed ourselves to replacing
the conventional curriculum with a free-flowing exploration of the unknown. We
replaced the professor-dominated, text-oriented norm with an inquiring learning

community of professors and students engaged in independent critical thinking based
on reason and argument, not on authority and dogma. (Moran, 2006, p. 16)
Moran goes on to explain, “we preferred ideas over ideologies, openness over
orthodoxy, cooperation over competition, and individual explorations over
groupthink” (p. 19). The first doctoral dissertation on media ecology was
Christine Nystrom’s Towards a Science of Media Ecology: The Formulation of
Integrated Conceptual Paradigms for the Study of Human Communication Systems
(1973). There she characterizes media ecology as a “perspective, or emerg-
ing metadiscipline… broadly defined as the study of complex communication
systems as environments” and concerned with “the interactions of commu-
nications media, technology, technique, and processes with human feeling,
thought, value, and behavior” (p. 3). Upon graduation, Nystrom joined the
media ecology faculty, and often engaged in team teaching with Postman. She
relates that, “along with language itself, teaching was Neil’s first and, I be-
lieve, most abiding passion” (2006, p. 23), and that “in six decades at NYU
he took, to my recollection, only one sabbatical—and even then, he couldn’t
stay away from students and classes” (p. 24). Moreover, she explains,
Neil was student-centered through and through, in love with the infinitely curious,
usually unpredictable, rarely logical, but always improvable workings of the human
mind. That was, for him, the subject matter of every class—how we do our thinking
and how we might get better at it, or at least less stupid. (p. 24)
Perhaps most telling of all, she says of Postman,
The ermine stoles and dazzling hoods that marked his honorary degrees gathered dust
behind his office door, and the engraved silver cups and gold pens that commemo-
rated this or that award for his books were handed out with appalling casualness to
visitors who dropped by: “Here—would you like this?” But NYU’s clunky and mate-
rially worthless medal for distinguished teaching hung on his chest at every occasion
that called for academic attire, until its purple and white ribbon was worn to a frazzle.
(p. 23)
Postman’s disregard for many forms of academic status perhaps helps to

explain why there has been some controversy over who coined the phrase
media ecology, a question that has generated a surprising amount of con-
troversy. As previously noted, the phrase first appears in the program for
the 1968 meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, and in
Postman’s address at the conference. In addition to his own statement that
he was naming the field, Nystrom writes in her 1973 dissertation, “in coining
the term… Postman pointed out that he was not inventing a non-existent
field, but simply giving a name to the kinds of inquiries in which a number
of scholars … were already engaged” (p. 112). Between the first appearance
in print of media ecology in the NCTE program in 1968, and the publication
of Postman’s address in 1970, a typed report entitled English for an Electronic
Age: A Media Ecology Approach K-12 prepared on behalf of the Cherry Creek
Schools of Denver, Colorado, and dated 1969 was completed, authored by
Patricia Meeks, Virginia Piland, Karen Prichard, Jane Riebesell, and Eliza-
beth Scrogin, and filed with the Educational Resources Information Center.
No reference to Postman appears anywhere in the report, even though the
content is clearly derived from the ideas expressed in his NCTE address.
When I brought this to Postman’s attention during the nineties, he did not
recall the document but remembered serving as a consultant for the Cherry
Creek Schools, which would be the obvious point of diffusion. Similarly, an
article entitled “Media Ecology” written by Raymond Arlo was published
in 1971 in the third issue of a magazine called Radical Software, a periodical
devoted to independent video production made possible by the then-new
technology of the portapak. The article makes no mention of the fact that
Arlo was a student of Postman’s in the newly created Media Ecology Program
at New York University, again obscuring the point of diffusion. It seems likely
that Arlo and/or other students of Postman introduced the phrase media ecol-
ogy to the portapak community somewhat earlier than the publication of this
article, as it appears, without explanation, in the first issue of Radical Software
(1970), in an interview by Jud Yalkut of Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider.
This pattern of diffusion suggests that Postman had a significant influence in
an area he is not typically associated with, video art.
Postman himself muddied the waters by attributing the origin of media
ecology to Marshall McLuhan in an interview recorded for the Understand-
ing McLuhan CD-ROM (Southam Interactive, 1996). When I asked Postman
about this, his first response was to tell me that it had originated in a letter
McLuhan sent to Claire Booth Luce. The letter, which had been published in
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan (Molinaro, McLuhan, & Toye, 1987), con-
tains the following sentence: “As for restricting the use of TV, it surely should
be a part of a media ecology program” (p. 534). I pointed out that I was the
one who first brought this letter to his attention and noted that the letter
was dated 1978, a decade after his NCTE address. Postman then said that
media ecology came from McLuhan’s major work, Understanding Media (1964).
As it turns out, the Understanding McLuhan CD-ROM had a fully searchable

electronic version of Understanding Media, which made it easy to determine
that the phrase does not, in fact, appear anywhere in the text (nor does media
environment). When next I saw him and related my findings, Postman laughed
and allowed that he must have coined media ecology himself, and only at-
tributed it to McLuhan to give it a more prestigious pedigree. To be honest,
I was aware that Postman was not taking my interest in the history of media
ecology altogether seriously, as it seemed trivial and overly academic to him,
and it was possible that he was deliberately trying to frustrate my attempts at
pinpointing the origins of the phrase. Like McLuhan, Postman was a bit of a
trickster, as Andrew Postman (2003) revealed in this anecdote in his eulogy
for his father:
It wasn’t simply that our father was unsurpassed for his generosity, a man unconcerned
with money in those ways that really shouldn’t concern us. It was that, in the bygone
era before EZ Pass, when my family went on vacations and passed through a tollbooth,
my father would frequently pay for the car behind us—total strangers. When the lucky
car was waved through by the tollbooth operator and finally pulled up alongside us, and
everyone in their car would squint, trying to figure out where they must know their
mystery benefactors from, my sister Madeline and my brother Marc and my mother
and father and I would be smiling and waving at them like fools until the other car
finally waved back, realizing that—what do you know?—they’d just had a very unique
experience, and saved fifty cents in the process. By the way: I can hear my father ask-
ing, “What question is EZ Pass the answer to?” Sure, he’d say, it decreases the time you
wait in line at the tollbooth. But, like all new technologies, there’s a Faustian bargain
to it. Use an EZ Pass and you’ll never again know the pleasure of turning a mundane
tollbooth trip into an occasion to connect with your fellow humans.
Andrew had said, in his eulogy, that Neil Postman was an exception to the
rule that it is incorrect to ever say that anything is very unique (unique mean-
ing one of a kind), and this extends to his lack of concern with taking credit
for coining the phrase media ecology. And while Postman contributed to the
controversy, at least some of the confusion lies in the fact that media ecology is
a McLuhanesque phrase, one that seems like the sort of expression McLuhan
would come up with, and one that was certainly inspired by him. Moreover,
while coining a phrase is traditionally associated with its publication in a for-
mal setting, especially in a printed document, it is perhaps a reflection of our
contemporary postliterate culture that the controversy extends to the oral
origins of media ecology. By nature, this would be difficult if not impossible
to document, and no one, to my knowledge, has a definitive memory of a
particular individual first uttering the phrase, not to mention the fact that it
may have been arrived at independently more than once. In personal con-
versation, neither Nystrom nor Moran could recall media ecology’s moment
of birth, although Nystrom told me that she thought it was one of Postman’s
students, and Eric McLuhan has also put in a claim to originating the phrase.
If nothing else, it seems clear that media ecology emerged out of the ferment
of the 1967–1968 school year, which Marshall McLuhan spent in New York
City as Fordham University’s Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities,
accompanied by Edmund Carpenter and Harley Parker, working with John
Culkin and Tony Schwartz, and assisted by his son Eric, and Paul Ryan, who
went on to become one of the pioneers of the portapak movement in video
art. During this time, Postman frequently traveled uptown to the Bronx to
meet with McLuhan, and according to Postman (2000) it was McLuhan who
suggested that he create the media ecology graduate program, although the
naming of it came later, as Moran (2006) relates
Human memory is not always accurate, but my best remembrance of how we came to
select “media ecology” as our name happened one afternoon in 1969 or early 1970…
we played with a variety of names to distinguish our program from the rest of En-
glish education and other communication programs. Neil proposed “media ecology”
and we played with it as a metaphor, testing how it could help us to think critically
and originally about media and culture. Clearly Neil and we were influenced in our
approach by Marshall McLuhan, our intellectual godfather and friend of the pro-
gram, but we were also influenced by our linguistic-semantic background that placed
McLuhan’s understanding of media as environments into a larger framework that
Neil and Charlie Weingartner … called the “Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski-Ames-Einstein-
Heisenberg-Wittgenstein-McLuhan-et al. Hypothesis.” We were also influenced by
our background in literary theory, including textual analysis and reader-response con-
structs, giving us a humanistic approach to understanding communication. (p. 18)
The choice of media ecology, while conferring upon the program and the field
a unique identity, also left the faculty and students open to criticism, as Post-
man (2000) relates:
In the early days of our department, we were subjected to a good deal of derision,
some gentle and some nasty, about our use of the phrase “media ecology.” I think the
objection was that the term was too trendy, but more than that, the term was more
comfortable in biology than in social studies and ought to remain there. (p. 11)
He goes on to explain that the reason they chose media ecology is to highlight
the fact that our media, including all of our technologies and techniques, and
our symbols, codes, and languages, constitute an environment that influences

us just as much as the natural environment does, if not more so. I should also
point out that he did not mean to suggest that the two environments are
entirely separate from one another, as they do interact and overlap in sig-
nificant ways. He merely wished to call our attention to the fact that media,
technology, and symbolic form are just as environmental for us as the various
geological, geographical, atmospheric, and biological elements that surround
us. Postman (2000) also explained the added value of ecology as a metaphor:
our first thinking about the subject was guided by a biological metaphor. You will re-
member from the time when you first became acquainted with a Petri dish, that a me-
dium was defined as a substance within which a culture grows. If you replace the word
“substance” with the word “technology,” the definition would stand as a fundamental
principle of media ecology: A medium is a technology within which a culture grows;
that is to say, it gives form to a culture’s politics, social organization, and habitual
ways of thinking. Beginning with that idea, we invoked still another biological meta-
phor, that of ecology. … We put the word “media” in the front of the word “ecology”
to suggest that we were not simply interested in media, but in the ways in which the
interaction between media and human beings gives a culture its character and, one
might say, helps a culture to maintain symbolic balance. (pp. 10–11)
It follows that the difficulty we face in trying to understand, let alone an-
ticipate, the impact of the introduction of a new medium or technology
stems from the fact that the effects are ecological in nature. As Postman and
Weingartner explain in Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969):
Any good ecologist could inform you of the logic of your problem: a change in an
environment is rarely only additive or linear. You seldom, if ever, have an old envi-
ronment plus a new element, such as a printing press or an electric plug. What you
have is a totally new environment requiring a whole new repertoire of survival strategies. In
no case is this more certain than when the new elements are technological. Then,
in no case will the new environment be more radically different from the old than
in political and social forms of life. When you plug something into a wall, someone
is getting plugged into you. Which means you need new patterns of defense, percep-
tion, understanding, evaluation. You need a new kind of education. (p. 7)
It is also worth noting that Postman was not the first to use the term ecology
outside of a biological context. Not long after ecology was coined by Ernst
Haeckel in the late 19th century, Patrick Geddes (1904, 1915) introduced the
concept of a human ecology, which was soon picked up by members of the fa-
mous Chicago School of sociology, notably Robert E. Park, Earnest W. Burgess,
and Roderick D. McKenzie, leading in turn to references to social ecology

and an ecology of culture (Carey, 1989; Hawley, 1986; Novak, 1995; Strate,
2006a). Moreover, ecology bears some relation to systems theory and the sys-
tems view, which emerged in the postwar era, gained popularity during the
sixties (Bateson, 1972, 1979; Bertalanffy, 1969; Boulding, 1956; Capra, 1996;
Laszlo, 1972; Watzlawick, Bavelas, & Jackson, 1967; Watzlawick, Weakland,
& Fisch, 1974), and had a major influence on Postman’s thinking about the
field of media ecology (see also Nystrom, 1973). In a 1973 keynote address
to the Speech Communication Association (presently known as the Na-
tional Communication Association), Postman used the concept of systems
to provide common ground between communication environments based on
face-to-face interaction occurring in physical locations and media environ-
ments created by way of technological transmission and storage of messages
(Postman, 2006):
From the ecological perspective, content analysis, for example, is viewed as either
trivial or irrelevant. What matters to us is context, and to the extent that media
ecology has, as yet, a methodology, that methodology might be called context analy-
sis. This implies looking at communication environments as systems within systems
within systems. It means trying to identify the significant characteristics of each sys-
tem as a whole, the subsystems of which it is composed, the larger system within
which it functions, and all the significant relationships among them. To make things
even more confusing, context analysis takes as its subject matter the transactions be-
tween individual and reality, individual and individual, individual and group, group
and group, group and culture, culture and culture, and tries to see them all as func-
tions of one another. Moreover, context analysis, or media ecology, gives special at-
tention to the roles played in each of these transactions by the media through which
they are conducted. By “medium,” we mean any agent or agency through which two
or more discrete elements are linked in a transacting system. Communications media
include, therefore, both technologies like film, radio and television, and techniques,
which are media composed of a set of procedures. … The technique known as “op-
erant conditioning,” for example, is a medium that links Behavior A to Behavior B.
Parliamentary procedure is a medium connecting event A to event B; and the medi-
um known as Aristotelian logic links Statement A to Statement B. Thus, from our
point of view, a technology or technique is an environment within an environment.
(Postman, 2006, pp. 8–9)
Postman’s context analysis incorporated the symbolic interactionist approach

of George Herbert Mead (1934), H. D. Duncan (1962, 1968), and Erving Goff-
man (1959, 1961, 1963, 1967), with the cultural analysis of Edward T. Hall
(1959, 1966) and Raymond Birdwhistell (1970), and the relational view of
Bateson (1972, 1979), and Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues (Watzlawick
et al., 1967; Watzlawick et al., 1974), but he also continued to emphasize lan-
guage and semantics, and the idea of the “semantic environment” derived from
general semantics (Johnson, 1946; Koryzybski, 1993), for example in previous-
ly cited references to the “ecology of the semantic environment” (Postman,
Weingartner, & Moran, 1969, p. 14). These threads came together to form the
basis of Postman’s 1976 book, Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk. Popular among general
readers as well as communication educators, Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk was some-
thing of a self-help book in the tradition of general semantics, providing a
wide-ranging discussion of the concept of the semantic environment:
A semantic environment includes, first of all, people; second, their purposes; third,
the general rules of discourse by which such purposes are usually achieved; and fourth,
the particular talk actually being used in the situation. … Now, because there are so
many different kinds of roles for people to play and so many different human purpos-
es, there are many kinds of semantic environments, each with special rules by which
people are expected to conduct themselves. Science is a semantic environment. So
is politics, commerce, war, sports, religion, lovemaking, law making, among others.
Each of these situations is a social structure in which people want to do something
to, for, with, or against other people, as well as to, for, with, or against themselves. I
am referring to those semantic environments which give form to our most import-
ant human transactions. Moreover, within any one of these semantic environments,
there are many subenvironments which, when taken together, comprise the larger
environment. (p. 9)
Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk was largely about interpersonal communication, al-
though Postman used examples drawn from the mass media to illustrate prob-
lems in language and meaning. The concept of the semantic environment
does relate directly to Postman’s concern with public discourse in Amusing
Ourselves to Death (1985), as public discourse constitutes a semantic envi-
ronment, one made up of many subenvironments devoted to news, politics,
religion, education, and other matters. His ability to analyze communication
environments and his love of language also served him well as a public speak-
er, an activity he excelled at. In another lecture given to his students that has
been transcribed and published by Janet Sternberg (2006b), he explains that
public speaking is a performance, that the performer should “take context and
surrounding into account in planning and delivering your speech,” and while
he strongly recommended that every word be written out and then thoroughly
rehearsed, he stressed that “speeches must be written for the ear, not the eye”
(p. 75), advice that also influenced his written work. In addition to being
an author, speaker, and educator, Postman became the editor of the journal
founded by Hayakawa, ETC: A Review of General Semantics, in 1976, a posi-
tion he held until 1986. As editor, he sought to advance the discipline of gen-
eral semantics by broadening its scope, publishing numerous articles on media
ecology, which he had argued could be viewed as general semantics writ large
(see Postman, 1974). Thom Gencarelli (2000, 2006a) suggests that Postman’s
editorial work on ETC constituted a major turning point in his career (see
also Lum, 2006), contributing to his emerging status as a public intellectual.
The end of the seventies certainly was a turning point for Postman in a
number of ways, as he published Teaching as a Conserving Activity in 1979. As
the title indicates, Postman had had a change of heart, and reversed himself
from his earlier positions on educational reform. Whereas in his previous col-
laboration with Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969),
he had concluded that schools needed to change in order to adjust themselves
to the new cultural environment dominated by television and the electronic
media, a decade later Postman argued that young people do not need any
help in adjusting to television, but rather needed the print-oriented environ-
ment that traditional schooling provided. He identified television as a curric-
ulum in its own right, as well as “the major educational enterprise now being
undertaken in the United States” (p. 50). Children, he argued, spend more
time watching television than they do in the classroom, and he identified
the television curriculum as distinguished by the following characteristics:
attention-centered (rather than content-centered); nonpunitive (no negative
feedback); affect-centered (rather than idea-centered); present-centered (rather
than being oriented towards earning future rewards); image-centered (rather
than word-centered); narration-centered; moralistic; nonanalytical; nonhierarchi-
cal; authoritarian; contemptuous of authority (other than its own); continuous in
time; isolating in space; discontinuous in content; and immediately and intrinsically
gratifying.
As for his shift in position regarding teaching, Postman presented it in
terms drawn from cybernetics and systems theory, arguing for a thermostatic
view in which schools need to adjust themselves in such a way as to restore
balance to a culture. During the sixties, when the culture was slow to adapt to
the new electronic media environment, schools needed to emphasize change.
Entering the eighties, with the culture fully committed to the electronic me-
dia, schools needed to balance this out by conserving the print culture that
was rapidly disappearing. However much this amounted to a reversal of his
previous position, Postman remained constant in his insistence that schools
provide instruction in understanding language, symbolic form, and media; he

also used the phrase information environment in this work, accompanied by the
following description:
Every society is held together by certain modes and patterns of communication which
control the kind of society it is. One may call them information systems, codes, mes-
sage networks, or media of communication. Taken together they set and maintain the
parameters of thought and learning within a culture. Just as the physical environment
determines what the source of food and exertions of labor shall be, the information
environment gives specific direction to the kinds of ideas, social attitudes, definitions
of knowledge, and intellectual capacities that will emerge. (p. 29)
Postman went on to offer media education based on the media ecology ap-
proach as one of the solutions to the problems he had identified, and his ex-
planation of the concept represents a bridge between his earlier discussions of
the semantic environment and his new emphasis on media and technology:
Media ecology is the study of information environments. It is concerned to under-

stand how technologies and techniques of communication control the form, quantity,
speed, distribution, and direction of information; and how, in turn, such information
configurations or biases affect people’s perceptions, values, and attitudes. Thus, me-
dia ecology transcends several subjects of wider acceptance, including, for example,
psychology and sociology, since it assumes that the psychology of people and their
methods of social organization are, in large measure, a product of a culture’s charac-
teristic information patterns… such information forms as the alphabet, the printed
word, and the television image are not mere instruments which make things easier
for us. They are environments—like language itself, symbolic environments—within
which we discover, fashion, and express our humanity in particular ways. (p. 186)
Following the publication of Teaching as a Conserving Activity, Postman be-

came a leading critic of television and the electronic media, appearing on
television with increasing frequency to deliver his humanistic critique of the
medium and its impact on human affairs. In his next book, The Disappear-
ance of Childhood (1982), he noted that television reveals the secrets that we
previously were able to keep from children; in revealing all, he argued that
television blurs the sharp distinction between the concepts of childhood and
adulthood characteristic of print culture. The result is not only a tendency to
view and treat children as little adults, but also a trend towards more childlike
behavior among adults. Whereas Teaching as a Conserving Activity included an
implicit contrast between television and print in that the traditional class-
room is an institutionalization of print culture, The Disappearance of Childhood
provided Postman’s most comprehensive contrast between the age of typog-

raphy and the age of television. And while the book was highly acclaimed, it
was overshadowed by the publication of Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985,
which became Postman’s most popular and influential work. Writing again
about “crazy and stupid talk,” he argued that serious subjects, such as news,
politics, religion, and education become trivialized when televised, that the
medium’s bias favors entertaining formats that emphasize images and imme-
diacy. Postman remained an outspoken critic of television in works such as
Myths, Men, and Beer (1987), coauthored by Christine Nystrom, myself, and
Charles Weingartner, which called for the banning of beer commercials; op-
posed the introduction of cameras into the courtroom as a member of a New
York State Advisory Committee charged in 1988 with considering the inno-
vation; and collaborated with newscaster Steve Powers to demystify broadcast
journalism in How to Watch TV News (1992, a revised edition, updated by
Powers, was published in 2008).
Postman published some of his best essays in a collection entitled Con-
scientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Ed-
ucation (1988), in which one chapter summarized Amusing Ourselves to Death
(1985) and another one was based on The Disappearance of Childhood (1982).
In the book’s preface, he expresses his view that “grievance is the source of
all interesting prose,” explaining that, “without grievance, a writer tends to
become a celebrant, which is an agreeable but repetitious state” (p. xi). Not
all grievances are of equal worth, however, and Postman qualifies his position
by noting that, “unless one’s complaints are grounded in a sense of duty to
one’s country or to a recognizable humane tradition, they are not worthy of
serious attention” (p. xvi). The grounding for Postman’s grievances is the hu-
mane tradition he found in the ideals of the Enlightenment, and his approach
also was influenced by the 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper (1989, 2002,
2003), who argued that scientific theories and hypotheses can never be proven
true, as there is always the possibility of discovering a falsifying instance in the
future. Scientific knowledge, therefore, progresses through falsification, the
elimination of what is found to be untrue, and along the same lines, knowl-
edge and human life in general progress through criticism, that is, through
identifying and eliminating error. This influence was especially reinforced by
his long friendship with his colleague Henry Perkinson, a professor of educa-
tional history whose work was grounded in Popper’s philosophy. Perkinson
(1991, 1995, 1996) went on to write several books on media and culture as a
response to Postman’s arguments.
The lead essay in Conscientious Objections (1988), “Social Science as Mor-

al Theology,” critiques the emphasis on quantitative and empirical research
that dominated social and psychological research into the eighties, and had
even made inroads into the humanities. It also stands as one of Postman’s
most important statements about the field of media ecology. He begins by
raising two key questions: “What are legitimate forms of research in the social
sciences? And, what are the purposes of conducting such research?” (p. 5).
By way of answering the first question, he critiques the notion that the social
sciences are in fact scientific, arguing instead that they are a form of storytell-
ing, and concludes: “the answer to the first question is that by resisting the
attractions of pseudo-science, and embracing the role of creators and narrators
of social myth, media ecologists can enrich our field of study immeasurably”
(p. 17). The title of the essay gives away the answer to the second question, as
he argues that what social science really is about, or at least ought to be about,
is moral theology, the goal being: “to contribute to human understanding and
decency” (p. 17). Postman ends this essay with the following conclusion:
The purpose of social research is to rediscover the truths of social life; to comment
on and criticize the moral behavior of people; and finally, to put forward metaphors,
images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding
and dignity. Specifically, the purpose of media ecology is to tell stories about the
consequences of technology; to tell how media environments create contexts that
may change the way we think or organize our social life, or make us better or worse,
or smarter or dumber, or freer or more enslaved. I feel sure the reader will pardon a
touch of bias when I say that the stories media ecologists have to tell are rather more
important than those of other academic storytellers—because the power of commu-
nication technology to give shape to people’s lives is not a matter that comes easily
to the forefront of people’s consciousness, though we live in an age when our lives—
whether we like it or not—have been submitted to the demanding sovereignty of new
media. And so we are obliged, in the interest of a humane survival, to tell tales about
what sort of paradise might be gained, and what sort lost. We will not have been the
first to tell such tales. But unless our stories ring true, we may be the last. (pp. 18–19)
Postman’s emphasis shifted from specific technologies such as television, to

technological innovation itself in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to
Technology (1992), where he argued that the introduction of new technolo-
gies always has unforeseen and wide-ranging consequences, echoing his previ-
ous discussions of media ecology:
Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean

“ecological” in the same sense that the word is used by environmental scientists. One
significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given
habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a
new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same
is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the
ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract some-
thing. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was
invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Eu-
rope. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television
gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school,
to every church, to every industry. And that is why the competition among media is
so fierce. Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization—not to
mention their reason for being—reflects the world-view promoted by the technology.
Therefore, when an old technology is assaulted by a new one, institutions are threat-
ened. When institutions are threatened, a culture finds itself in crisis. (p. 18)
The unpredictable and harmful effects of new technologies are exacerbated

by the fact that our culture places few if any brakes on the adoption of in-
novations. Postman refers to our type of culture as a technopoly, which he
contrasts with tool-using cultures, where the use of technology is limited and
strictly utilitarian, and tradition holds sway, and technocratic cultures, where
the use of technology as end in and of itself begins to take hold, and belief in
progress comes to dominate the culture, but many cultural institutions remain
unaffected, and something of a balance still exists. In a technopoly, however,
technology has gained a monopoly over the culture, efficiency is the only
value universally held, and no institutions remain unaffected by the techno-
logical imperative. Postman argues that, as a technopoly, American culture
provides no defenses against the overload brought on by information tech-
nologies such as the computer and the Internet. This prompted some to label
Postman a neo-Luddite, although he mainly argued for giving more thought
to the unforeseen and negative consequences of technology, and for main-
taining values, ethics, and social institutions independently of the technolog-
ical imperative. Moreover, even when he took as his theme the hardware of
technology, he never lost sight of the paramount importance of the software
of language. Similar critiques took the form of an address entitled “Informing
Ourselves to Death” (Postman, 1990), ironically enough circulated widely on
the Internet, and short pieces such as “Cyberspace, Shmyberspace” (1996).
Postman shifted his focus from media and technology to broader cultural
issues in his final two major works. In The End of Education (1995), he dis-
cussed the decline of our common culture and generally shared set of beliefs, a
condition he had previously diagnosed as brought on by the electronic media
and technopoly. Postman argued that under such conditions, public educa-
tion could not maintain its vitality, or its viability. It is here that Postman
makes clear his allegiance to Enlightenment rationalism and the American
creed. Here too, Postman acknowledged the fact that Roger Waters of Pink
Floyd fame had released an album entitled Amused to Death in 1992:
Readers should know that Roger Waters, once the lead singer of Pink Floyd, was
sufficiently inspired by a book of mine to produce a CD called Amused to Death. This
fact so elevated my prestige among undergraduates that I am hardly in a position
to repudiate him or his kind of music. Nor do I have the inclination for any other
reason. Nonetheless, the level of sensibility required to appreciate the music of Roger
Waters is both different and lower than what is required to appreciate, let us say, a
Chopin étude. (p. 167)
In his eulogy for his father, Andrew Postman (2003) noted that his father’s
musical tastes ran towards the Big Band Era, and that “when Roger Waters,
co-founder of Pink Floyd, paid homage to my father’s most famous book by
titling one of his albums Amused to Death, I’m afraid the honor was almost
completely wasted on my dad.” Personal taste aside, Postman was concerned
with much more than the state of contemporary culture, and once more of-
fered media ecology as the basis of an educational system, arguing in particular
that definitions, questions, and metaphors constitute “three of the most po-
tent elements with which human language constructs a worldview” (p. 175),
and concluding with a call for technology education based, in part, on the
following 10 principles:
1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a

new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
2. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never dis-
tributed evenly among the population. This means that every new
technology benefits some and harms others.
3. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes
two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, technology predis-
poses us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments
and subordinate others. Every technology has a philosophy, which
is given expression in how the technology makes people use their
minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the
world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional
and intellectual tendencies it disregards.
4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It com-

petes with it for time, attention, money, prestige, and a “worldview.”
5. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technol-
ogy does not merely add something; it changes everything.
6. Because of the symbolic forms in which information is encoded, dif-
ferent technologies have different intellectual and emotional biases.
7. Because of the accessibility and speed of their information, different
technologies have different political biases.
8. Because of their physical form, different technologies have different
sensory biases.
9. Because of the conditions in which we attend to them, different tech-
nologies have different social biases.
10. Because of their technical and economic structure, different technol-
ogies have different content biases. (pp. 192–193)
In 1999, as a response to President Clinton’s rhetorical call to build a bridge to

the 21st century, Postman published Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century.
There he argued that we needed to bring with us into the new millennium
the rationality of the Enlightenment, the product of print culture. Here once
more, he remained steadfast in arguing that understanding language, media,
and technology would go a long way towards helping us address our social ills,
and he highlighted the following six questions about media and change:
1. “What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?” (p. 42).

2. “Whose problem is it?”
3. “Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed
by a technological solution?” (p. 45).
4. “What new problems might be created because we have solved this
problem?” (p. 48).
5. “What sort of people and institutions might acquire special economic
and political power because of technological change?” (p. 50).
6. “What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies,
and what is being gained and lost by such changes?” (p. 53).
Postman was particularly given to invoke the first question in succinct form:
To what problem is this a solution? He noted that often there was no clear an-
swer, or that the problem was a trivial one, or one that had already been
solved. Such was the case for the problem of a lack of information, so that
efforts to continue to solve the problem led to information overload. Postman

also would oppose claims made about what a given technology could do for us
by asking, in turn, what will it undo?
In 1990, Postman became chair of New York University’s Department
of Culture and Communication, and in 1991, he spent a semester as the
Laurence Lombard Visiting Professor of the Press and Public Policy at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 1993, he
was promoted to the rank of university professor at New York University, and
in 1998 he was awarded the Paulette Goddard Chair of Media Ecology. He
stepped down as department head in 2002, after being diagnosed with lung
cancer, but never officially retired. Neil Postman passed away on October 5,
2003. Although the Media Ecology Program that he had begun over thirty
years earlier did not survive for very long after his death, the Media Ecolo-
gy Association founded on September 4, 1998 by five of his students, myself
included, continues on to this day. In his keynote address at the first MEA
convention, he concluded by saying, “as I understand the whole point of media
ecology, it exists to further our insights into how we stand as human beings,
how we are doing morally in the journey we are taking” (Postman, 2000,
p. 16). He made it clear at the onset of his address that in providing his
point of view on media ecology, he was not intending to impose it on any-
one else. Postman encouraged independent thinking from his students, and his
openness was on clear display in the famous “debate” between Postman and
Camille Paglia published in Harper’s Magazine, in which they wound up ami-
ably agreeing much more often than anyone expected them to (Postman &
Paglia, 1991). He was however, a harsh critic of the lack of clarity, dependence
of jargon, convoluted sentence structure, and other misuses of language in
much of academic writing, and in reflecting on his own career, concluded that,
if an academic has anything interesting or useful to say, I believe he or she has a

responsibility to say it to fellow citizens. And, of course, to say it in a way that will
capture and hold their interest. It is something of a minor tragedy that so many
brilliant academics I know—people who have a great deal to say of interest to their
fellow citizens—have been conditioned to write in a way, as Shakespeare said it, that
no human ear can endure to hear. (Gencarelli, Borisoff, Chesebro, Drucker, Hahn,
& Postman, 2001, p. 134)
Postman’s criticisms were often accompanied by his distinctive brand of hu-

mor, as was apparent in an email that appeared on a discussion list devoted to
the topic of media ecology that we had set up in 1997, prior to the formation
of the MEA. His colleague, Christine Nystrom, had been showing him the
discussion list, most of the members being at that time former students of his,
and let him read the messages that were posted to it in the first few months
of its existence, including her own. Postman then used Nystrom’s account to
send the following to the list:
This is the Ghost of Marshall McLuhan speaking to you. I don’t have to tell you from
what world I come. I am using Chris Nystrom’s facility in order to reach you. I will
say what I have to say only once. You will not hear from me again unless you persist
in your foolishness.
Does the word “books” mean anything to you? Do you have so much time on your
hands that you can afford to waste yourselves on this infernal machine??? Have you
already accumulated so much wisdom that you no longer need to read the best that
has been thought and written? Is this the way you honor the work and life of my great
friend and disciple, Neil Postman? Do any of you actually know how to spell?
I have now read all of your idiotic messages. Hear, now, The Law: Every medium
taken to its furthest extent flips to its opposite? Thus the written word, which is
the source of all the intellect we have, when used in this unholy fashion becomes a
medium for the expression of all our stupidities. This, you have demonstrated amply.
Enough, I say.
I must now return from whence I came. Remember what happened to the Hebrews
when they did not follow the Law.
Ghost (Nystrom, 1997).
As I have noted, Postman was a bit of a trickster. Andrew Postman (2005)

relates another example:
In 1986, soon after the book was published and had started to make ripples, Dad was
on ABC’s Nightline, discussing with Ted Koppel the effect TV can have on society if
we let it control us, rather than vice versa. As I recall, at one juncture, to illustrate
his point that our brief attention span and our appetite for feel-good content can
short-circuit any meaningful discourse, Dad said, “For example, Ted, we’re having an
important discussion about the culture but in thirty seconds we’ll have to break for a
commercial to sell cars or toothpaste.”
Mr. Koppel, one of the rare serious figures on network television, smiled wryly—or
was it fatigue?
“Actually, Dr. Postman,” he said, “It’s more like ten seconds.” (pp. xv–xvi)
On July 14, 2003, less than three months before he passed away, a segment aired
on The Daily Show program on cable television’s Comedy Central channel,
featuring Postman being interviewed by comedian Rob Corddry on the topic
of technology. While Postman was willing to play the straight man responding
to Corddry’s absurd questions and comments, Postman did get off a good line
at the end of the segment. Corddry was perseverating on a talking toaster he
had seen at a Sharper Image store, and finally demanded of Postman, “whose
side are you on?” And Postman, without missing a beat, responded, “I’m not
on the toaster’s side.” This perfectly sums up his position as a humanist, asking
us to think about how to retain our humanity in an increasingly technological
world. And although he resisted using email, and wrote his books on yellow
pads with a black felt pen, Postman was not as much of a Luddite as some
made him out to be. He watched television (how else could he have been such
an astute critic of the medium?), especially enjoyed sports broadcasting, and
he appreciated the innovation of the fax machine. Perhaps he is best charac-
terized by the phrase he used for the last chapter of Technopoly (1992, p. 181),
“the loving resistance fighter.”
Postman’s contributions, as a scholar, teacher, and public intellectual, en-
riched many different fields of study, including semantics, linguistics, commu-
nication, media studies, journalism, education, psychology, English, cultural
studies, philosophy, history, sociology, political science, religious studies, and
technology studies, etc.
Some years ago, in the course of a conversation we shared on the writing
styles that intellectuals and academics employ, he summed up his position
on language with these words: “Clarity is courage.” Postman wrote and spoke
with a crystalline courage. I have previously characterized him as a “defender
of the word” (Strate, 1994, 2003), as he labored to defend the word from the
internal threats posed by the abuses and misuses of language, and from the ex-
ternal threats posed by the proliferation of media images, and the technolog-
ical drive to reduce all phenomena to quantities. And perhaps the final word
to be said about Neil Postman is that he was, above all else, a media ecology
scholar, or, as he liked to put it, a media ecologist.
·3·
media ecology as
a scholarly activity
Neil Postman formally introduced the field of media ecology in 1968, and
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) has taken its place as one of the most fre-
quently cited works in the field, along with Marshall McLuhan’s Understand-
ing Media (1964), and Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982). In my book,
Echoes and Reflections (Strate, 2006a), I tried to provide a comprehensive
overview of media ecology scholarship (see also Lum, 2006; Strate, 2011),
which is neither possible nor necessary to duplicate here. Instead, I will pro-
vide some generalizations about the field as an aid to understanding Postman’s
perspective and approach.
First, as a field, media ecology is an open system. There are no clear
boundaries that separate subject matter studied within the field from subject
matter that is considered outside of the field’s area. Clearly, the study of media
is central to the field, but the term media can be defined very broadly, a point
I will elaborate on later. Media ecology is communication-centered, but not
confined to the study of communication, as, for example, the significant in-
terest in topics such as the history and philosophy of technology fall outside
of the boundaries of the communication field. Highly interdisciplinary, me-
dia ecology maintains strong connections to literary and cultural studies, art
history, musicology, philosophy, theology, history, anthropology, sociology,
political science, economics, psychology, computer and information science,

biology, and even physics; indeed, no discipline or subject is entirely excluded
from consideration within the field of media ecology, and its open systems
approach is consistent with the ecological view inherent in the field.
Second, media ecology has no distinct point of origin. Postman (1968)
did not claim to have invented the field and did not identify anyone else as a
founder in the sense that August Comte is said to be the founder of sociology,
for example. Media ecology is not a school in the traditional sense, as compared
to psychoanalysis where there is a founder, Sigmund Freud, and followers such
as Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Alfred Adler. References are sometimes made
to the Toronto School, mainly on the strength of McLuhan’s influence, and
while Toronto certainly has been a center of media ecology scholarship, so
have St. Louis and New York City. The designation invisible college would bet-
ter describe the relationship between media ecology scholars (whose object
of study is the invisible environment of media, symbols, and technology) than
any geographical symbolism. Sometimes, Plato’s Phaedrus (1973) is identified
as the first example of media ecology scholarship, although the comments
and criticisms on the invention of writing make up but a small portion of the
dialogue, while Postman (1985) suggested that the Ten Commandments of
Moses can be seen as an even earlier example of applied media ecology (see
also Strate, 2011). But the field is largely a 20th-century phenomenon and
begins with many separate lines of inquiry on language and symbolic commu-
nication, art and perception, culture and communication, orality and literacy,
the history of writing and printing, the study of various forms of electronic and
audiovisual media, cybernetics and systems theory, and the study of technol-
ogy, technique, and the technological society. Attempts to synthesize these
strands began during the 1950s at the University of Toronto, when Marshall
McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter published nine issues of an interdisciplinary
journal entitled Explorations, leading to the publication of McLuhan’s two
most significant works, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media
(1964). They continue with Postman’s (1968, 1970) formal introduction of
the field of media ecology, his launching of a graduate program in that field
in 1970, and his cultural critiques such as Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
and Technopoly (1992). Other scholars have produced additional syntheses
of their own (e.g., Bolter & Grusin, 1999; Kuhns, 1971; Meyrowitz, 1985;
Nystrom, 1973; Ong, 1967, 1982). The founding of the Media Ecology Asso-
ciation in 1998 and the establishment of the MEA’s journal, Explorations in
Media Ecology in 2002 marked a major turning point in the establishment of
media ecology as a scholarly activity 45
the field, followed by the publication of Casey Man Kong Lum’s (2006) an-
thology, Perspectives on Culture, Technology, and Communication: The Media
Ecology Tradition, and my own Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a
Field of Study (2006) and On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on
General Semantics and Media Ecology (Strate, 2011).
Third, the field of media ecology is closely related to what James W. Carey
(1989, 1997) referred to as American cultural studies and to what Camille
Paglia (2000) identified as the North American intellectual tradition. While
European scholars have made substantial contributions to the field, much of
the interest in and work being done in the field have come from the United
States and Canada. As the field has no single founder or point of origin, it is
perhaps best viewed as a relatively decentralized network, although it is cer-
tainly the case that the works of Postman and McLuhan are very close to the
center of the network. Insofar as the name for the field was not universally
recognized or adopted for most its history, media ecology scholarship is often
based on networks of citations, and the works cited are usually books rather
journal articles—Postman’s media ecology curriculum took a great books ap-
proach to graduate education.
Fourth, within the field of media ecology, the key term of medium, con-
stitutes a much broader category than elsewhere. In popular usage, the phrase
the media tends to refer only to mass media or even more specifically to news
media, and in the field of communication, the term has also traditionally been
limited to mass media such as television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines,
and books. This tends to exclude media such as the telegraph and telephone,
as well as letters, notes, and memos, which have for the most part been used
for point-to-point transmission, and consequently for interpersonal, group, and
organizational communication. For most of its history, the field of mass com-
munication considered such media to be outside of their boundaries, while the
field of interpersonal communication tended to concentrate on face-to-face
communication, otherwise referred to as unmediated. Such strict and arbitrary
boundary lines do not exist within the field of media ecology, where the empha-
sis is on the technology rather than the content or specific use. For example, the
telegraph introduced the possibility of instantaneous communication over great
distances, and it is of lesser significance whether any given message sent by te-
legraphy was received in the form of a personal telegram or a wire service report
in a mass circulation newspaper. This, at least in part, is what McLuhan (1964)
meant by his famous aphorism, the medium is the message (Strate, 2008a), which
Postman (1985) revised as, the medium is the metaphor. Following McLuhan’s
media ecology approach, Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart (1979, 1982,
1986) pioneered the exploration of mediated interpersonal communication,
and the growing attention given to new media starting in the 1980s brought
to the fore the inadequacy of the mass/interpersonal divide, as new media and
more recently social media perform both functions, along with an unprecedent-
ed level of many-to-many communication. While other approaches struggled to
reorient themselves, the media ecology intellectual tradition proved particularly
well suited for the study of new media (Levinson, 1999; Strate, 2012a; Strate,
Jacobson, & Gibson, 1996, 2003).
In communication and related disciplines, scholars often give the impres-
sion that media did not exist prior to the 19th century, apart from a cur-
sory acknowledgment of Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of the printing
press, whereas media ecology takes into account the entire history of human
communication. This includes the history of printing, the manuscripts and
scribal culture that preceded typography, the history of writing systems and
surfaces, the invention of numerals and other forms of notation, as well as
oral traditional forms such as poetry, sayings, and songs, and techniques such
as the use of mnemonics, formulas and formulaic expressions, and rhythm and
meter, all of which may be deemed oral media (Strate, 2012b). Speech itself
can be viewed as a medium, as can language in general and specific languages
in particular (Carpenter, 1960), and even the sensory organs, the nervous
system, and the body can be studied as media through which we relate to our
environment.
In that a medium is understood as a type of context, it can also take
the form of a face-to-face situation, such as the classroom, the office, and
the home (Goffman, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1967). The physical attributes of the
situation, such as the way that chairs and tables are arranged, can structure
interaction in different ways, as for example a traditional classroom is set up
to minimize interaction among students and direct attention to the front of
the room and to the teacher and blackboard, while a room set up with chairs
in a circle facilitates greater interaction of a more egalitarian nature, and the
addition of a table to sit around increases the formality of communication
(Hall, 1966). Apart from the physical aspect of the situation, the relation-
ships we establish also can be understood as structuring communication, for
example, the establishment of a teacher-student relationship serves as a me-
dium through which further communication can occur, and will structure the
interaction in certain ways that differ from what might occur in a parent-child
relationship or a supervisor-employee relationship. Paul Watzlawick and his
colleagues (Watzlawick, Bavelas, & Jackson, 1967) distinguish between the

content and relationship level of communication, which parallels the two
levels of content and medium. In this sense, the teacher-student relation-
ship constitutes a medium within which educational content can be shared.
Watzlawick et al. based their understanding of relationship on systems theory,
so that we can understand systems, relationships, and media to be essentially
synonymous (Strate, 2011).
Symbols systems, codes, or languages can be understood as media, as can
varieties of symbolic form that are not clearly systematized, including images
or icons, style, and art in general. The distinction between form and content
parallels that between medium and content, and it follows that the concept
of form in its broadest sense can also be incorporated into the category of me-
dium, with the advantage that medium provides a more materially grounded
connotation than form. Form is synonymous with pattern and closely con-
nected to relationship, a reminder that medium is more than simply the mate-
riality of communication, but also includes the less tangible phenomenon of
means or method. Put another way, the term medium represents both technolo-
gy and technique, and technique corresponds to codes such as the alphabet, to
formal elements such as artistic style, and to methods such as calculus, empir-
icism, and the assembly line. In the field of media ecology, medium may refer
to all types of human innovation, not just those devoted to communication,
although that function is often stressed.
Within the field of communication, the concept of medium is often con-
sidered synonymous with channel, a linear metaphor in which communica-
tion is viewed as a form of transportation or transmission, a pipeline through
which messages are sent and received (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). And while
there are special instances in which this view is applicable, in general this
model has been rejected by media ecology scholars (Carey, 1989; Ong, 1982;
Schwartz, 1974). In its most basic meaning, medium refers to something that
goes in-between, and links elements together. And while a linear channel or
pipeline fits this definition, so does a substance that surrounds and pervades,
that is to say, an environment. This is perhaps easier to understand in the age
of the Internet, as that decentralized network has eclipsed older, more linear
forms of communication. Transportation models also present the channel or
medium as an afterthought, representing communication as beginning with a
source who constructs a message, and then chooses a medium through which
to send the message on to a receiver. But in reality, the medium has to come
first. Before the source can create a message, there first must be a medium to
construct the message out of, a medium such as a language or symbol system,
and/or raw materials and methods such as paper and pen and the practice of
handwriting, or electricity, a computer, and the ability to type on a keyboard.
While McLuhan (1964) described media as extensions of the human body,
Mumford (1967, 1970) emphasized the role of containers as technology, which
better fits an understanding of media as environments. The idea of media as
extensions is not inconsistent with this view, however, as that which extends
us into the environment must, thereby, come between us and the environ-
ment, and what comes between us and our environment becomes our new
environment. This applies to the material aspect of technology, and to media
as epistemology (Postman, 1985), as ways in which we gather information about
the world and come to know and understand our environment. As extensions
of our senses, media affect the way that we receive information about our envi-
ronment, and to the extent that reality is a social construction, they constitute
the materials and methods out of which we construct our realities. The two
aspects of media as environments, the physical and the phenomenological, are
not entirely distinct from one another, and interact insofar as we act upon our
world based on our mediated perceptions of our environment.
In the field of media ecology, a medium need not be a communication
technology, as all forms of technology, all manner of technique, all means
and methods that we employ, are ways in which we understand, relate to,
and act upon our environment. Moreover, there is no hard and fast dividing
line between media as natural and artificial environments except insofar as
we wish to make such distinctions. Tool use is not unique to human beings,
nor are complex communication systems, which is not to deny the distinctive
qualities of our species, but simply to note the broader implications of the
term medium. Simply put, the universe as an environment can be considered
a medium with its own distinctive properties. On a smaller scale, life emerg-
es within a particular medium or environment, and the process of evolution
is one of adaptation to that medium or environment. But organisms do not
merely adjust themselves to their environment. They also have an effect on
their environment if for no other reason than by their very presence, through
their metabolism and reproduction. And for this reason, they cannot help but
alter their environment, preferably in ways that make their environment more
conducive to their own survival. In this way, it is not only species that evolve,
it is also environments and ecosystems. This understanding provides the com-
mon ground between the biological and the technological, through the cate-
gory of medium, and helps to dispel the straw man argument of technological
determinism (see Strate, 2012c). A final point about the concept of medium
is required, which is that it should be understood as representing not a thing,
but a process of mediation, a relation or relationship (Strate, 2011).
At this point, I should acknowledge that Postman was not overly con-
cerned with the specific definition of medium, although he did include a brief
discussion in Amusing Ourselves to Death, likening the relationship between a
technology and a medium to the brain and the mind, suggesting that while a
technology is nothing more than a machine, a medium is “the social and in-
tellectual environment” (p. 84) created by the machine as it is combined with
a code or symbol system, becomes associated with a social setting, and with
an economic and political context. While this is consistent with Postman’s
emphasis on language and semantics in his earlier work, I believe that the
main reason that he included these remarks was to respond to (and hopefully
preempt) criticisms of his media ecology approach that he had received after
the publication of The Disappearance of Childhood (1982). Having made this
distinction, Postman goes on to argue that “every technology has an inherent
bias,” and “an agenda of its own” (p. 84), so that the inherent bias of televi-
sion as a technology tends to result in its use as an entertainment medium.
Some may find this division useful, and it should be understood as simply a
different way to carve out the territory from that of a definition of medium
that incorporates the concept of technology. For my own part, I do not find
the distinction necessary and prefer to employ the more inclusive concept of
medium, one that Postman himself adhered to elsewhere.
With this general understanding of the field of media ecology in mind, it
is now possible to consider the analysis of media environments, focusing on
several key characteristics of communication technologies. One is our ability
to communicate over space. Oral performance and public address, for exam-
ple, have a limited range, based on available acoustics, while written messag-
es, especially on lightweight surfaces such as papyrus and paper, can be moved
across distances, limited only by the availability of transportation technolo-
gies (Innis, 1951). The 19th-century invention of the electrical telegraph is
seen as a major turning point in that it was the first technology to overcome
the limitations of physical transportation and make instantaneous communi-
cation possible. The development of wireless transmission at the end of the
19th century overcame the restrictions of wired connections, and the addition
of the communications satellite during the 1960s made global communica-
tion an everyday occurrence. Of course, any distance is surmountable given
enough time, so the speed at which messages can be communicated is also a
key characteristic. McLuhan (1964) emphasized the overwhelming impact of

the speeding up of communication due to the introduction of the electronic
media, including the telegraph, telephone, wireless, radio, and especially tele-
vision, and it is readily apparent that the acceleration has continued with the
addition of the Internet and mobile devices.
Speed involves the factor of time as well as space, but another aspect of
time is the durability of a medium and/or its ability to preserve or store mes-
sages over time. Language and the capacity for symbolic communication are
the basis of what Alfred Korzybski (1993) referred to as time-binding, the
ability to pass knowledge down from generation to generation. Before the
invention of writing, knowledge could only be stored within human memory,
aided by mnemonic devices, preserved by repeated utterance in the form of
oral media, and passed down by word of mouth. Writing, which first appears
circa 3500 BCE among the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, stands as arguably
the most significant invention in human history as it enables knowledge to
be stored externally. Continued progress in the technology of writing, such
as the invention of the Semitic alphabet circa 1850 BCE, the development
of the Greek alphabet circa 750 BCE, the invention of the codex during the
1st century CE, and the introduction of the printing press with moveable type
circa 1450, all greatly expanded our capacity for accumulating knowledge.
Electronic storage has further enhanced these capabilities to an extraordinary
extent, but also introduced concerns as changing technologies and formats
may render storage media and files unreadable and inaccessible.
The characteristics of communication over distance, speed of com-
munication, and communication over time, all are related to a fourth key
characteristic, the volume of communication made possible by a medium, the
number and size of messages that can be shared, the amount of information
that exists within a given media environment. Language and the capacity for
symbolic communication allow for enough volume of information for our spe-
cies to survive, while writing, printing, and electronics, each in its turn, has
given rise to new explosions of knowledge and information, at times, especial-
ly of late, resulting in information overload. Major increases in the volume of
communication give rise to new media whose purpose is to help in organizing,
analyzing, and synthesizing the new information and knowledge (Hobart &
Schiffman, 1998). This can take the form of techniques such as specialization,
soft technologies such as Aristotelian logic, or material media such as the
parchment codex, and constitutes a category that Levinson (1999) refers to as
remedial media. Of course, technological solutions to technological problems
inevitably introduce new technological problems, which require still more

technological solutions—this is why Jacques Ellul (1964) argued that tech-
nology expands at a geometric rate in a technological society.
The key characteristic of volume is related to another important char-
acteristic, that of accessibility. Accessibility itself can be subdivided into two
components, corresponding to the read-write dichotomy associated with new
media. On the read side of the coin, there is access to communication, mes-
sages, information. In oral cultures there are relatively few barriers to percep-
tion, as anyone who speaks the language can have access to the entirety of the
culture. Writing introduces new obstacles to access hitherto unknown to us,
as it requires both the ability to decode the text, a skill that requires a great
deal of specialized education, and physical access to the text itself. Logograph-
ic writing systems, where each character stands for an entire word and there
are thousands of different characters to be learned, favor what Harold Innis
(1951) called monopolies of knowledge, where a privileged few hold the keys
to the kingdom of textuality. Scarcity of writing materials and difficulties in
copying documents also serve to enforce a monopoly of knowledge and restrict
access to knowledge. Innis argued that such monopolies are eventually broken
up by the introduction of new media that increase accessibility, such as the
alphabet, the codex, and the printing press; while these innovations did not
remove the requirement of literacy for access to knowledge, they made doc-
uments easier to obtain and decode than was previously possible. They also
allowed for increasing literacy rates, and a shift from what Havelock (1982)
referred to as craft literacy, where a small group works with documents for vo-
cational purposes, such as priests and accountants, to social literacy, where the
majority read for entertainment as well as work, the culture itself is encoded
in writing, children are sent to school in early childhood to learn how to read,
and universal literacy becomes a feasible goal. Even with universal literacy,
barriers exist between children who have not yet mastered reading and adults
who have, leading to an extended concept of childhood (Postman, 1982;
Meyrowitz, 1985), and the specialization of language and knowledge associ-
ated with print media served to enforce separations among many other social
and vocational groups (Meyrowitz, 1985). The introduction of audiovisual
media, photography, movies, radio, and especially television, bypassed the re-
quirements of literacy, making information accessible on a scale never before
seen, leading to the undermining of the concept of an extended childhood
(Postman, 1982; Meyrowitz, 1985), blurring the distinctions between other
social groups, especially in regard to gender and sexuality, and undermining
authority (Meyrowitz, 1985), a process that has only intensified with the ad-
dition of the Internet and mobile technologies.
Reading and writing have generally gone hand in hand, as have speak-
ing and listening, although there have been some situations where reading
was taught without writing, in an effort to maintain control over knowledge.
Printing introduced the first great divide between read and write, being the
first form of mechanization of a handicraft, requiring both mechanical know-
how and the capital necessary to pay for machinery and laborers. The result
was the separation of printers and publishers from their readerships. This was
further exacerbated by the introduction of steam-powered presses in the ear-
ly 19th century, which produced the first mass circulation newspapers, along
with dime novels, popular magazines, and much ephemera. This is often con-
sidered the beginning of the age of mass communication, followed by the ad-
dition of sound recording and the motion picture in the late 19th century, and
by radio and television broadcasting in the 20th. The mass media required
massive investment in machinery, as well as complex organizations to sup-
port their activities, and this has followed a trajectory of corporatization and
concentration of ownership that continues to this day. As extreme as this
trend has grown, the electronic media have also given rise to new media that
have restored to a significant degree the write side of the equation, providing
individuals with access to the tools to create and distribute content over the
Internet. The breaking of monopolies of knowledge is perhaps most apparent
in the rapid decline of the newspaper in the United States as well as in declin-
ing television viewership. Of course, knowledge of computer programming
languages still represents very much a monopoly, and the code that new media
run on, and with it the ability to create and modify the media themselves,
remains inaccessible to most individuals.
The key characteristic of the form of communication that a medium em-
ploys, which includes the code or symbol system used in communication,
can be distinguished by its complexity (Campbell, 1982), by its resolution,
fidelity, or quality (McLuhan, 1964), and by the senses they appeal to (Hall,
1959; McLuhan, 1962, 1964; Ong, 1967, 1982). Vision and hearing are the
two most significant senses in communication, and they differ in significant
ways. When we listen, we are at the center of what McLuhan (1962, 1964)
termed acoustic space, as hearing works in a 360-degree circle—all sound is sur-
round sound. The listener is therefore a centered subject, in the middle of the
world, in medias res, occupying a subjective position. Vision, by way of con-
trast, can be turned on or off—we can close our eyes but not our ears—and is
directional. We must choose which way to look at any given time. And espe-
cially when our eyes are trained to focus intently by learning how to read, the
viewer becomes a voyeur, a spectator, and a peeping tom, looking at the world
like an outsider looking in, standing apart from the world. This alien vision
places the viewer, and especially the reader, in an objective position. Both
McLuhan and Ong characterize western culture as exhibiting a high degree of
visualism, especially the modern culture that was born out of typography. It
is important to note that while visualism refers to the dominance of sight, it
is the abstract vision based on literacy and not the concrete vision associated
with images and icons. This is one of the reasons why McLuhan and Ong see
a shift away from visualism in the era of the electronic media. For example,
visualism is associated with a heightened visual sense reinforced by the re-
quirement of silence, while electronic media include varieties of what Ong
calls secondary orality, e.g., sound recording, telephone, radio, and audiovisu-
al media, notably television. The other senses are also utilized in oral cultures
as memory aids, and McLuhan argues that some measure of the nonliterate
sensory balance is restored through electronic communications. This can be
seen not only through the addition of electronically mediated sound, but in
the role that now tactility plays through the television remote control, the
mouse (a form of mediated pointing and touching) and varieties of keyboards
and typepads, and game controllers, not to mention the use of vibration in
gaming interfaces and mobile devices. Full sensory stimulation has been the
goal of virtual reality technology, and we are seeing significant progress being
made towards its achievement.
While every code and mode of communication can be said to have its own
version of a grammar and a vocabulary, its own forms of expression and ways of
encoding feeling, thought, and experience, an important distinction is made
between two broad categories which Langer (1957) terms presentational and
discursive symbolic forms, and Bateson (1972, 1979), Watzlawick, Bavelas, and
Jackson (1967), and others refer to as analogical and digital communication.
Discursive and digital forms include the written and spoken word, and number.
Langer includes perception and most forms of art and ritual within the category
of presentational form, while Bateson and Watzlawick et al. include nonverbal
communication and iconic communication under the heading of the analogi-
cal. Images are categorized as presentational and analogical, and this informs
much of Postman’s critique of television. Images are analogical in that they
signify by their resemblance to what they represent (or rather, to our internal
conceptions) as opposed to symbols, which are arbitrary in their relationship
to what they represent, their meaning based only on implicit agreement and
convention. Images are also continuous, not composed of discrete units, and
they are not discursive, meaning that they cannot make statements, or propo-
sitions. A statement such as, it is raining outside right now, is propositional in
that it is possible to test its validity by gathering evidence, in this case by direct
observation, and thereby determining whether it is true or false. An image is a
concrete representation so that a picture of rain is neither true nor false because
it makes no claim about anything but itself. A picture can be tampered with
because, airbrushed, or photoshopped, but it is not a fake until it is attached to
a statement. Only if I say that the picture of rain represents the weather outside
can we move into the realm of truth and falsity, but even then it is my words and
not the picture that can be proven true or false. For this reason, pictures serve as
an excellent source of propaganda, as both sides in a conflict may use the same
picture of a bombed-out building, one side claiming that it was a weapons fac-
tory that was destroyed, the other that it was a civilian residence (and indeed,
both claims may be true).
McLuhan (1964) observed that media incorporate other media as their
content, a process that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999) refer
to as remediation. For example, writing is invented as a means of recording
spoken language, and whether the written work is a product of dictation or
not, its content is speech, insofar as characters in a logographic system stand
for spoken words, and letters in an alphabet stand for sounds that make up
parts of words. The handwritten document in turn becomes the content of
printing, and the first products of the printing press in early modern Europe
were designed to look as much like manuscripts as possible. And print in
turn becomes the content of electronic writing. As I type these words on
my computer’s word processor, what I see resembles ink on paper, but in
actuality is only made up of photons and electrons. When a new medium
is introduced, no one yet knows what its full range of capabilities are, so it
makes sense that the first thing that we try to do with it is the same thing
that we were doing with the old medium. McLuhan referred to this as rear-
view mirror thinking (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967). Bolter and Grusin note
that remediation is not limited to newer media remediating older ones, as,
for example, computer screens can appear in photographs in print media. In
another sense, all media have been remediated by the computer medium,
either through the use of digital technologies, or through the Internet as a
delivery system, which is why Alan Kay dubbed the computer a metamedium
(Kay & Goldberg, 1977).
Conditions of attendance constitute another key characteristic of media.

The mode of reception is a difference that makes a difference, as, for example,
watching television by yourself is a different experience from watching in a
group, both in the possibility of commenting on and discussing (or dissing)
the content and in the heightened self-consciousness that goes with it. Read-
ing aloud is a different experience from reading to yourself, whether you are
alone or in the company of others, factors that also change the experience and
meaning of the content. Watching a motion picture in a movie theater as part
of an audience is different from watching the film by yourself in the comfort
of your own home. And using a mobile device to watch a TV program or read
email is quite different from sitting on a couch watching a television set or
LED screen or sitting at a computer station. Some types of media naturally
bring people together, such as public address and performance. Some types
of media favor isolation, such as reading and writing. And some do both at
the same time, notably electronic media. Related to conditions of attendance
is the characteristic of mode of delivery. We can distinguish between media
that we have to actively obtain, such as going out to buy a book, newspa-
per, or magazine, and media that are delivered to us, by mail, for example, or
electronically. Paralleling physical delivery, media adopt particular modes of
address. The camera conveys a sense of intimacy that is often unobtainable
in reality, especially through the close-up; the microphone does the same for
voice. The cinema’s big screen communicates from a larger-than-life position,
while the smaller screens associated with television do the opposite. Writing
is able to bring us into the interior thoughts of other individuals in ways that
dramatic performance cannot, except by the externalized device of the mono-
logue. The graphical user interface of the Macintosh and Windows operating
systems invites us to explore a desktop environment in ways that the com-
mand line structure of older computer interfaces do not.
In analyzing media and media environments in this way, the primary con-
cern is with their effects on individuals, relationships, groups, and society, on
communication, consciousness, and culture. The emphasis on effects has led
some to label media ecology scholars as media or technological determin-
ists. As I have argued elsewhere (Strate, 2012c), technological determinism
is generally put forth as a straw man argument, as there is no affirmative rep-
resentation of a deterministic outlook in the media ecology literature, except
insofar as we have allowed our technology to get out of control. Deterministic
language is sometimes used to dramatize a given point, or as a shorthand,
so we might say that printing “caused” nationalism, just as a biologist might
say that evolution “caused” hominids to walk erect. But rather than putting
forth a serious argument for true determinism, media ecology scholars sim-
ply take the position expressed by John Culkin (1967): “We shape our tools
and thereafter they shape us” (p. 52). That is, the changes and innovations
we introduce have consequences (Rogers, 2003). Those consequences can be
positive or negative, desirable or undesirable, and it is impossible to separate
the two. Moreover, whether positive or negative, some of the consequences of
an innovation may be intended, or at least anticipated, but there will always
be others that will be unintended, and unanticipated. The effects of a change
introduced into a complex system will always be somewhat unpredictable,
which suggests a need for caution in the face of technological progress, some-
thing we rarely exercise. One of the reasons why the results of change can be
so unpredictable is that, once an innovation is adopted, it will result in direct
effects, but these in turn will give rise to indirect effects, and these secondary
effects will lead to tertiary effects, and so on, in ecological fashion. The indi-
rect effects are often unanticipated, and all too often undesirable.
It follows that it is absurd to think that the consequences of changes
that we put into motion are entirely under our control. The effects are not
pre-determined, and some media ecology scholars prefer the idea of a soft
determinism in which innovations constitute a necessary but not sufficient
cause, which is to say that they make possible or facilitate certain effects, or to
use Lynn White Jr.’s (1962) metaphor, they open a door but do not command
us to walk through it. It does not detract from human agency to acknowledge
that we live in a complex environment with natural, social, and technological
components, and that our freedom of action is constrained. I can choose what
to watch on television, or not to watch it at all, but I cannot choose to live
in a world that is free of television’s influence, and the same can be said of
airplanes, computers, and nuclear weapons. McLuhan’s laws of media present
another framework for considering the effects of innovation, indicating that
the introduction of a new medium will enhance or extend some aspect of
human life while obsolescing another aspect, while also retrieving or allowing
for the revival or resurgence of some previously obsolesced element, and when
pushed into its extreme, reverse or flip into its opposite (McLuhan & McLu-
han, 1988). These four laws or four questions (as the model is often framed
in interrogative form) can be understood as basic points about the effects of
introducing a change to a system. The change will add something to the sys-
tem, and therefore enhance some part of the system; the addition will displace
some pre-existing part of the system, obsolescing it; the part of the system that
has been obsolesced presumably had, at some earlier point, displaced some
even older part of the system, which now will be freed to resurface (this par-
allels what Freud referred to as the return of the repressed). Systems being
nonlinear, as the change intensifies, it will not continue to result in more of
the same, but will eventually yield effects opposite to what it had at a lower
intensity.
Thinking in terms of systems theory also provides an alternative to the
language of cause and effect, based on the concept of emergence (Deacon,
2012). Emergent properties are the consequence of the structure, interaction,
and relationship among parts of the system, which lead to effects in a non-
linear and unpredictable manner, as order emerges out of chaos, and a system
itself can emerge via the process of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1992). In
this sense, the effects that result from innovations are not the result of direct
cause and effect; rather, in introducing changes to the system, new properties
emerge out of the new system (Strate, 2011, 2012c). Aristotle’s metaphysics
provides a similar alternative in that it posits efficient causality, on which
cause-and-effect relations are based, as only one of four types of causation.
The other three are material cause, the materials out of which the end product
or result is formed; final cause, the purpose or final state (e.g., state of equilib-
rium) towards which the end product or result moves; and formal cause, the
form or pattern that the end product or result follows. While modern science
limits itself to efficient cause, with some acknowledgment of material cause,
systems theory and the concept of emergence represent new manifestations of
final and formal causality (Campbell, 1982; Deacon, 2012), and Marshall and
Eric McLuhan (2011) have argued that media effects are best understood as
products of formal causality.
Media effects can be understood as operating on both micro and macro
levels. On the micro level, we can focus on the effects that media have on
individuals, on the psyche, sense of self, and identity, on thought, emotion,
behavior, and interpersonal relationships. On the macro level, we can focus
on the effects that media have on groups, on society and culture, on politics
and economics, on education, art, commerce, government, the military, jus-
tice, religion, etc. In broad terms, we can view media as playing a leading
role in human affairs and as a key factor in human history. In this manner,
we can understand that what makes our species distinctive is our capacity
for language and symbolic communication; that the transition from tribal,
nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies into agricultural settlements, cities, and
what traditionally has been referred to as civilization goes hand in hand with
the development of notational systems and the invention of writing; that the
distinctive qualities of western cultures are based on the twin pillars of al-
phabetic writing originating in ancient Israel and ancient Greece; that the
transition from the medieval to the modern world was associated with the
printing revolution attributed to Gutenberg; and that the electronic media,
and especially television, have signaled the end of the modern era, and the
beginning of a new period whose characteristics are too new to entirely define,
leaving us only to designate it as postmodern. This periodization of histo-
ry stands as an alternative to the standard divisions of prehistoric, ancient,
medieval, and modern, and the socioeconomic distinctions between tribal/
hunter-gatherer, agrarian, industrial, and now the post-industrial or informa-
tion age. And I would argue that it constitutes a better way to understand the
history of our species.
Admittedly, the view I have laid out maintains the traditional emphasis
on western culture, but it can just as easily be applied to non-western culture.
And it is also possible to use the approach with greater specificity, in conjunc-
tion with cultural history, to analyze for example the impact of the invention
of paper in China circa the 2nd century ce, or the role that printing played
in the political turmoil of 17th-century England, or the effects of telegraphy in
bringing about national unity in 19th-century Italy and Germany. There are
no absolute boundaries between the macro and micro levels of analysis, and a
media ecology approach can easily be used in conjunction with ethnograph-
ic research. Unlike much of contemporary cultural theory, however, media
ecology scholars have always been open to a concern with the big picture,
with big questions such as what drives human history, what makes us human,
and what are the prospects for the future of our species and our culture? Such
questions concerning life, the universe, and everything, as Douglas Adams put
it, provide the foundation from which Postman launched his critical analyses
of contemporary American culture.
·4·
the evolving american
media environment
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman draws a sharp contrast between the

Age of Typography and the Age of Television in order to make his argu-
ment that American culture has been thrown dangerously out of balance.
He acknowledged that he was playing the part of a “Great Abbreviator”
(p. 6), doing so in order to present his critique in a clear and concise manner.
Media ecology scholarship often employs a dialectical approach as a device to
further our understanding of the differences between modes of communica-
tion or technologies, for example, between orality and literacy, or logographic
and alphabet writing systems, or scribal and print cultures, or in Mumford’s
(1934) opposition between mechanical and organic ideologies, Innis’s (1951)
contrast between heavy and light media and time-biased and space-biased
cultures, McLuhan’s (1964) hot vs. cool dichotomy, and the basic distinction
between the human capacity for symbolic communication and its absence in
other species (Langer, 1957). While such contrasts may be subject to criticism
that they represent a “great divide” that overlooks continuities and complexi-
ties, clearly with so many great divides being discussed, no single one of them
is all that great, and much depends on the level of analysis being employed,
whether it involves a large historical overview, an ethnographic study of the
media environment of a specific culture, or a microanalysis of a particular
situation. In drawing the specific contrast between typography and television,

Postman was following the lead of McLuhan (1964) and building on an es-
tablished research tradition within the field of media ecology, and for my own
part, I cannot help but also be a great abbreviator in considering the evolving
American media environment.
As a product of western culture, American culture has its foundation
in the literate cultures of ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome, and as McLu-
han observed, the alphabet formed the basis of Gutenberg’s printing press,
although it was also dependent on the invention of paper in 2nd century CE
China. The combination of paper, moveable type made possible by new forms
of metallurgy, a mechanism derived from the wine press, and new types of ink
derived from Renaissance painting, all combined in the mid-15th century to
launch what Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979) referred to as the printing revolu-
tion. Printing not only represented the first mechanization of a handicraft
(McLuhan, 1962) but made it possible to produce many copies of a text in
the same amount of time that a single copy could be written out by hand,
thereby increasing access to information dramatically. This was the beginning
of a knowledge explosion, as increased output of printed texts, in turn, fueled
increasing investigation of the world and further publication; this also served
the financial interests of printers, who Eisenstein (1979) explains, were early
capitalists, investing in the means of production and hiring wage laborers. As
the volume of information and knowledge increased, specialization became
increasingly more necessary, with the trend towards ever greater specialization
in ever narrower subject areas continuing to this day.
Printing produced multiple identical copies of the same texts, eliminat-
ing the variation that was almost entirely inevitable with scribal copying and
creating forms of standardization that were previously all but impossible to
achieve or even conceive of. This led to a new emphasis on standardization
that spread throughout western culture, and which included the standardiza-
tion of vernacular languages through the establishment of a single “correct”
dialect, typically associated with capital cities, the primary location for print-
ing presses, and the ruling class, upon whom early printers were often depen-
dent. This, in turn, led to the introduction of distinctions between correct use
of language and deviations such as slang and dialects (a standardized language
is also a dialect, but one that came to be upheld as the language), between
proper grammar and grammatical errors, and correct and incorrect spelling
(Steinberg, 1996). The drive towards standardization spread to other aspects
of society and culture such as the establishment of standardized weights and
the evolving american media environment 61
measures, policies and procedures, and, of course, one of the most powerful
of all print media, the standardized form, the foundation of bureaucracy. The
standardization of language was achieved in part through the direct dissemi-
nation of print media, including the appearance of national literature, as well
as the periodical press. But more significantly, print media were institutional-
ized in the form of schools, whose main focus was on literacy and numeracy,
with a secondary focus on socialization and integration into a culture now
dominated by typography (Nasaw, 1979). And as Postman (1982) argued, the
sequestration of children in schools, where they only gradually gain access to
the secrets of adulthood that had been encoded into written texts, altered the
cultural conception of childhood, hardening its boundary with adulthood and
delaying entry into the adult world by a number of years.
The evolution of fonts towards increased legibility also enhanced literacy,
allowing for silent reading to become commonplace, which in turn made the
process of decoding texts easier and faster. The importance of reading out loud
should not be discounted, especially in that it amplified the effects of literacy
to some degree, as nonliterates could gain access to written materials in this
manner. However, the spread of literacy ensured that the biases towards visu-
alism and linear thinking and design that were nascent in the literate cultures
of antiquity came into full bloom in the typographic age. This is true as well
of individualism, insofar as the act of reading, and writing, especially when
silent, requires a high degree of social isolation. Even when a group reads
the exact same text at the exact same time, everyone reads separately, as an
individual, but when we listen, we listen as an audience, united as one in our
shared media environment. Printing also introduced the modern conception
of authors and authorship, with an emphasis on originality that had never
before existed. This was related to individualism, but also to the promotional
powers of print, as it introduced the first forms of mass advertising and public-
ity, especially through the printing of pamphlets, catalogs, calendars, circulars,
handbills, broadsides, etc., and later the introduction of newspapers and other
periodicals (Eisenstein, 1979). Additionally, typography opened up a concern
with layout and visual presentation, and the secondary invention of engraving
that soon followed constituted a revolution in the reproduction of images, but
significantly, one that was safely subordinate to the written word in most print
media.
In facilitating literacy, printing opened the door to an increased emphasis
on abstract forms of expression, placing special focus on ideas, as opposed
to oral tradition’s emphasis on concrete situations and narratives involving
agents performing dramatic actions, to satisfy its mnemonic requirements.

The printing of political treatises, platforms, and manifestos gave rise to the
concept of ideology, which refers to an integrated system of ideas (Goody,
1986, 1987). Printers seeking to defend their investments against piracy led
to the introduction of copyright legislation, and with it the first appearance
of the abstract concept of intellectual property. Easy access to the accumulat-
ed scholarship of centuries past facilitated scholarship, spurring on research
on the natural world and leading to the rise of modern science (Eisenstein,
1979); the empirical method represents another manifestation of visualism,
while scientific progress was dependent on publication, making research public
and open to testing. Modern science as a specialized activity was accompanied
more generally by what became known as the Age of Reason, the Enlighten-
ment. And while science was thought of as a branch of philosophy, as natural
philosophy, and did not become closely associated with technology until the
19th century, scientific progress was paralleled by progress in what was known
as mechanics, and the Enlightenment was also associated with an increase in
the rationalization of procedures. Through the increased knowledge, know-
how, and the rational approach fostered within print culture, a transition took
place from a culture characterized by Postman (1992) as tool-using to one that
he labeled as technocratic; in other words, technology and technical proce-
dures were given increasingly more control over certain segments of society
such as government in the form of bureaucracy and economics via capitalism.
Printing altered cultural conceptions of space and time, as Gutenberg’s in-
vention was followed a half century later by the discovery of the New World.
Although the voyages of Columbus and the explorers who followed him did
little to change the lives of most Europeans, their view of their place in the
world changed dramatically with the printing of maps and atlases. And while
paper was the material of choice for printed documents, which made them
not all that durable, the production of large quantities and their wide dis-
semination conferred upon print media preservative powers, to use Eisenstein’s
(1979) words, that went well beyond that of writing in stone. Printing fa-
cilitated historical scholarship and history writing, creating a new historical
consciousness, and, aided by the printing of calendars and periodicals, indi-
viduals became increasingly more aware of their place on what they came
to think of as a timeline. At the beginning of the age of typography, printers
published the written documents that had been written over two millennia
of scribal culture, granting figures such as Plato and Aristotle a level of fame
and influence that they had never achieved previously. This also elevated the
immediate past into a period of enhanced significance; as Eisenstein explains,

unlike previous rebirths of learning, the Italian Renaissance became fixed as a
permanent mutation. Given that manuscript media served as the early content
of print media, it is not surprising that Eisenstein notes that “one must wait a
full century after Gutenberg before the outlines of new world pictures begin
to emerge into view,” but by the mid-16th century, “a persuasive case … can
also be made out for regarding the age of incunabula as a major historical great
divide and for viewing the advent of printing as inaugurating a new cultural
era in the history of Western man” (p. 33). Simply put, printing served as the
agency through which European societies were transformed from the medie-
val to the modern.
Certainly, one of the most significant developments was the Protestant
Reformation, which began in 1517 with the posting of Martin Luther’s Ninety-
Five Theses. Whereas the Church of Rome, born out of a media environment
in which literacy rates were low and dependent on scribal manuscript pro-
duction, emphasized the mediation of priests, the use of icons and imagery,
and oral communication, Protestantism was based on the ready availability
of Bibles translated into the vernacular, making the word of God accessible
to every literate individual. This rendered clerical intercession obsolete, and
Luther’s slogan, “every man his own priest,” represented not only a rejection
of the Roman Catholic hierarchical organization, but an obligation to read the
Bible for oneself as a religious duty. Consequently, the Protestant movement
especially emphasized literacy education and the establishment of schools, and
Eisenstein (1979) also notes that Protestants made liberal use of print media to
promote their cause. The Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation represented
in some ways resistance to the new print media, but also a certain amount of
accommodation to them, for example, in the founding of the Jesuit order. As
Innis (1951) explained, the printing press broke the monopoly of knowledge
held by the Church of Rome, and the same may be said of its disruptive effects
regarding nationalism and democracy. Before printing, most of what consti-
tuted “news” was local in orientation, with occasional word of the outside
world being provided by travelers, often disseminated in church on Sundays.
Printing provided the basis for creating a true national culture, and led to the
first wave of nationalism in western Europe, through the standardization and
homogenization of government, law, and culture, and though the printing of
pamphlets, broadsides, and eventually newspapers, which provided informa-
tion and a sense of connection that transcended the local. And it is impossi-
ble to discount the effect of publicity, and the use of printing for propaganda
purposes, from political and religious leaders; indeed, the word propaganda was
coined by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 to denote the propagation of the faith.
As printing has been credited with creating a republic of letters, a virtual
community of scholars, intellectuals, and writers, it also more generally creat-
ed a reading public (McLuhan, 1962), which constitutes the basis of democra-
cy. With increased access to political information, the argument that subjects
simply do not know enough to manage their own affairs could no longer be
made effectively, and the breaking of the state’s monopoly of knowledge re-
sulted in the democratic revolutions of the modern era. As Thomas Carlyle
(1840/1940) wrote in the 19th century: “He who first shortened the labour
of Copyists by device of Moveable Types was disbanding hired Armies, and
cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic
world” (p. 29). Not just politics, but economics was transformed via the print-
ing of paper money as a new medium of exchange, the resulting standardiza-
tion of monetary systems, and the rise of capitalism. Overall, printing fostered
centralized political, economic, and social control, as well as the building of
colonial empires. But it also gave birth to the Enlightenment, which brought
together the ideals of political emancipation, self-government, and equality,
with a new emphasis on individualism, rationalism, and the scientific method.
The typographic media environment did not give rise to any utopian so-
cieties, nor was it an unmitigated good, as every innovation has its costs, but
its benefits were significant, and its impact constitutes true progress in human
life chances. It is out of this cultural mix that the American republic was
born, which Postman (1995, 1999) notes was the first nation to be argued
into existence. The American Revolution was fueled on printed pamphlets,
the best known being Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which Postman (1985)
notes sold approximately 400,000 copies within a population of 3,000,000,
commenting that “the only communication event that could produce such
collective attention in today’s America is the Super Bowl” (p. 35). The
importance of print media was enshrined in the Bill of Rights, in the First
Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which protects the
freedom of the press, as well as speech, and other forms of expression and
communication, specifically religion, peaceful assembly, and the right to pe-
tition the government. It is important to note that at the time of the framing
of the Constitution, professional journalism was entirely unknown, and the
essential protection the First Amendment afforded was for printers to publish
just about anything they cared to. This insured that political parties, them-
selves in many ways extensions of the printing press, would always be able to
promote their positions, as no ruling party could ever gain a monopoly over
typographic communication. All told, the Constitution of the United States
and the Declaration of Independence represent a remarkable expression of
Enlightenment values. However flawed they may have been in their practical
application, they set up the self-correcting system Postman (1995) referred to
as the American experiment, and established a utopian ideal in the limited
sense that Mumford (1922) discussed.
Postman (1985) stressed the unusually high literacy rates of the New En-
gland colonies, which has much to do with their Puritan roots and their adop-
tion of Ramist educational methods which Ong (1958) argues was a major
force in the diffusion of print culture’s visualism. While it is true that literacy
rates were lower elsewhere in Colonial America, New England provided the
New World with intellectual leadership, and the important point is that lit-
eracy rates throughout the colonies were significantly higher than in Europe,
especially among the gentry who led the Revolutionary War and founded the
new republic. While the great waves of immigration that arrived from the mid-
19th century onward included many who were either illiterate or not fluent in
English, the establishment and expansion of public school systems through-
out the 19th century insured the integration of first- and second-generation
children into the dominant literate culture (Nasaw, 1979). It is also the case
that printing technology, while not available to everyone, often took the form
of small, hand-driven presses during the colonial era and into the early 19th
century, making publishing a more egalitarian process than it would later be-
come. At the same time, the early press was produced for elites, leaders in the
political and business sectors, while the mass circulation newspapers of the
early 19th century, made possible by the invention of steam-powered print-
ing, made newspapers cheaper to purchase and information more accessible,
albeit at the same time lowering the level of discourse, and often resorting to
sensationalism to attract readers. In leaving behind the tradition of the par-
tisan press, newspapers embraced a new ideal of objectivity in reporting, but
this also meant that any political and economic biases that still might be con-
veyed would be presented in less overt ways, aside from editorial and opinion
columns (Schudson, 1978). Apart from such biases, the form of the newspaper
medium maintained a bias towards events and therefore against reporting on
long-term trends.
The enhanced capacity for production brought on by steam power created
a new problem that had never been encountered before. As Daniel Boorstin
relates in The Image (1978), a book that Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death
builds on in many ways, the old press reported on actual events occurring
in the world that were judged newsworthy, such as a war, accident, natu-
ral catastrophe, election, or the arrival of a ship bearing new cargo for sale.
Steam-powered printing made it possible to publish daily newspapers without
much trouble, and the mass circulation penny press was dependent on econo-
mies of scale. But to publish a daily paper requires sufficient content, and there
simply were not enough real events to fill the papers. Here we can see one of
basic patterns regarding new media. When first introduced, a new medium
draws on traditional sources of content, as, for example, when the printing
press was introduced, the first books to be published were manuscripts from
the past. But once that supply proves inadequate to the expanded capacity of
the new medium, there is a need to find new sources of content—in this sense,
the medium motivates the content. In the early days of printing, whereas older
manuscripts were mostly written in Latin, printers encouraged contemporary
authors to create new works in their vernacular languages, providing new con-
tent and expanding their market to literates with a more limited education.
In the case of mass circulation dailies, the first source of new content were
police reports of criminal activity, which never before had been considered
newsworthy (Schudson, 1978). We take for granted today that crime stories
are news, but Henry David Thoreau (1899) provides some incisive criticism
regarding news in the 19th century:
I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one
man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel
wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad,
or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read
of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care
for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is
gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. (pp. 107–108)
Apart from crime reporting, Boorstin (1978) notes that newspapers shifted
from gathering to manufacturing the news, that is, reporting on what he termed
pseudo-events, media events that only occurred for the sake of being reported.
The first such pseudo-event was the interview, followed by the publicity stunt;
later examples include press releases and press conferences, background brief-
ings, trial balloons, and news leaks. Out of this mix, two professions arose side
by side, journalism dominated by professional reporters and editors in the late
19th century, and public relations in the early 20th century. Boorstin’s con-
cept of the pseudo-event is essentially what postmodernist Baudrillard (1994)
meant by simulation and hyperreality: a manufactured representation of the

world that seems more real than actual events because it is created specifically
for the media, made accessible to the media, and made to work within the
biases of the media.
The industrialization of print media was a mixed blessing or, as Postman
(1992) would put it, a Faustian bargain, and consequently modern newspa-
pers have suffered from serious limitations and inadequacies. And as Ellul
(1965) argued, individuals who become news junkies are not necessarily well
informed in a thoughtful, reflective manner, as the pressure in our culture to
keep up with the news and have an opinion on major issues of the day leaves
individuals vulnerable to propaganda. Postman understood that the print me-
dia of the 19th and 20th centuries were imperfect, not ideal. But however
much they strayed away from the core virtues of literacy and typography, they
still were dominated by the written word, promulgating the literate mindset
and retaining enough of the biases of typography to play a positive role in our
culture. The undoing of print culture, then, came from two other avenues,
which Postman (1985) associated with photography and telegraphy.
Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” (see Benjamin, 1968), discussed how the mass
production of print reproductions of artworks destroys the aura of the original,
undermining its singular meaning even as it democratizes the content. Build-
ing on Benjamin’s analysis, Boorstin (1978) was concerned with the negative
impact of the reproduction of images, with our capacity to create illusions,
artificial representations of reality that leave us increasingly more alienated
from the actual world and subject to extravagant expectations, as well as with
the loss of both standards and coherence. Boorstin’s critique of image culture
also points to a decline of literacy; this meant not so much a rise in illiteracy
as a growing aliteracy, as individuals retaining the capability to read and write
increasingly choose not to, devoting their time and energy to other pursuits,
such as watching television (Boorstin, 1984). Susan Sontag (1977), also draw-
ing on Benjamin, explained that it was the invention of photography in 1826
that was truly revolutionary in regard to our relationship with images. Prior to
this innovation, images were understood to be mediated through the eye and
hand of the artist, and in this way subordinated to human subjectivity. The
photograph, on the other hand, provided an unprecedented aura of objectiv-
ity to the images created by the camera, even though there still is subjective
decision-making involved (e.g., how to frame and compose the image, camera
angle, lighting, etc.). The photograph gives us the sense that reality has in
some way been captured, frozen, and recreated, bestowing upon the medium
an unprecedented amount of legitimacy and power and opening the door to a
new form of image culture.
The impact of photography, while significant, was limited until the de-
velopment of techniques for the mass production of photographic images and
their incorporation into newspapers and other print media at the end of the
19th century. By that point, the invention of the motion picture had added
the dimension of time to the camera’s ability to capture a semblance of reality.
On the acoustic side of the equation, the 19th-century invention of sound
recording made possible the capture and recreation of the acoustic world,
eventually complementing the moving image to give us the talkies in 1927.
The invention of the telephone in the 19th century, and the introduction
of radio broadcasting made it possible to transmit sound over distance, and
television gave an immediacy to the distribution of images that had never
before been possible. McLuhan (1962, 1964) and Ong (1967, 1982) stressed
the acoustic qualities of television, both in its being presented, at least initial-
ly, as radio with pictures, and somewhat metaphorically in that broadcasting
transmissions more closely resemble the rippling of sound waves than it does
the linear transportation of written messages. In part this is also because of
the association between print and the abstract form of visualism of modern
western culture. By way of contrast, Postman identified television as a visual
medium not in that abstract sense, but in its unprecedented emphasis on con-
crete, visual images. After all, those who attend to television programming may
be thought of as an audience, an acoustic term, but they are also called viewers
and, in more recent parlance, eyeballs. And when we turn television on and
tune in to its messages, we say that we watch television, not that we listen to it.
Apart from traditional references to the television set, a more technical term
referencing the device as a collection of parts, video feeds have long been
watched on a monitor, and Ryan (1974) goes so far as to say that monitoring
the environment is the inherent bias of the medium. In the 21st century, with
the obsolescence of the cathode ray tube, we have taken to use terms such
as screens, once more commonly associated with motion picture and photo-
graphic slide projection, and displays, as in the phrase, flat screen display. These
terms support Postman’s argument that television is first and foremost a visual,
image-oriented medium. And however many other methods of producing and
distributing images preceded it, it is the addition of television to these other
technologies that has tipped the scales in regards to our becoming an image
culture.
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) can be understood as an extended

critique of image culture, and that is certainly a major emphasis of the book,
but to leave it at that would be only telling half of the story. Along with
photography, Postman also pointed to the invention of telegraphy as the
other game-changing technological development. Samuel Morse’s electrical
telegraph, developed in 1837, was the first electronic medium, and McLuhan
(1964), following Mumford’s (1934) arguments, argued that the transition
from mechanical to electronic technologies represented the most radical shift
in western culture since the invention of the alphabet. Certainly, the instan-
taneous transmission of information made distance all but irrelevant in com-
munications and involved a dematerialization of content, as written messages
were translated via Morse code into electronic impulses. It is at this point
that the concept of pure information, divorced from material form, becomes
possible. Thoreau (1899) famously criticized our nation’s new love affair with
Morse’s innovation:
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious
things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was
already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in
great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and
Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predic-
ament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman,
but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand,
had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We
are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer
to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flap-
ping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After
all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important
messages. (pp. 60–61)
Here again, Thoreau identifies news with gossip, and it turns out that gossip
does in fact serve as one of the main sources of communication content. The
telegraph, while used for point-to-point communication, revolutionized news
reporting through the establishment of wire services, beginning with the As-
sociated Press in 1846. By selling news reports to the newspapers, they turned
news and information into a commodity, independent of the print medium
within which it had appeared (Innis, 1951; Carey, 1989). This helped to solve
the problem of finding enough content to fill a daily newspaper, as editors now
could receive content outside of the local area that they regularly covered.
The telegraph on its own, and in conjunction with newspapers, served to bind
nations together, and shift attention towards national and international pol-
itics and away from the local (Carey, 1989). However, it also was associated
with a breakdown in coherence and linearity (McLuhan, 1964). With nu-
merous reports coming in quickly, and editors needing to fit the text into the
paper’s layout quickly, newspapers shifted away from a relatively linear pre-
sentation to the mosaic look of the modern newspaper, especially on the front
page of traditional papers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post
so that it became impossible to read a newspaper from beginning to middle to
end. This format anticipates the spatial juxtapositions typical of today’s web-
sites. Along with the mosaic, the inverted pyramid style of writing replaced
linear narrative, so that reports begin with the most important information in
the first paragraph (the famous who? what? where? when? why? and how?), the
second most important set of facts in the second paragraph, and so on, in order
to make it easy for editors to fit a report into the paper by cutting it at any
point. Electricity itself is intrinsically nonlinear, requiring the completion of
a circuit to function, which, in turn, becomes associated with the cybernetic
feedback loop, but this nonlinearity represents a reversal of the bias of writing
and print, and therefore the reversal of an emphasis that began five and a half
millennia ago, and had been intensifying since the printing revolution (see
Strate, 2012a).
Postman argues that the effect of the telegraph on discourse was three-
fold: it inundated us with information irrelevant to our everyday lives. Being
subjected to a barrage of information that we are unable to act upon in turn
has left us feeling impotent. And beyond being unable to act upon the deluge
of information that we received, we cannot even make much sense out of it,
finding it ultimately incoherent. In taking information out of its local situa-
tion, telegraphy was responsible for the decontextualization of information
on a scale previously unimaginable, a process that has been further intensi-
fied by other electronic media. That is why, as Thomas de Zengotita (2005)
notes, echoing Postman, awareness has become a major buzz word in recent
years. Even if we can’t actually do anything about a problem, we can become
aware that it exists, and that feels like something is being done. Celebrities
participate in awareness campaigns that we are asked to attend to, and we
ourselves can feel like we are helping by posting or sharing information via
email and social media. Increased awareness can be helpful, but often is a
poor substitute for action, and while monetary donations generated by such
campaigns are not insignificant, they remain a far cry from actively working
to solve a problem.
Telegraphic discourse is incoherent in its breakdown of linearity and its

abbreviated language, the language of newspaper headlines and, more recent-
ly, of Twitter, and status updates on social media. It is not the language of
careful explanation or reasoned argument, but the language of slogans and
shouts, of shallow and often banal utterances. In introducing the possibility
of instantaneous communication, the telegraph and the technologies that fol-
lowed in its wake placed a premium on the new, the novel, the current, the
immediate, the now, fostering impatience with delay and promoting a pres-
ent-centered mentality. In making information increasingly more accessible,
telegraphy benefited human society in many ways, but ultimately gave rise to
a flood of information whose volume proved to be overwhelming, resulting in
information overload, and what Postman (1992) referred to as “the great sym-
bol drain,” the demeaning of meaning through the overuse and trivialization
of significant cultural symbols.
The telegraph only begins the process by which the electronic media sup-
plant print as the dominant mode of communication in the United States and
elsewhere in the west, and we may refer more generally to telecommunications
technologies, which includes the telephone, the wireless telegraph, and radio.
What all of these technologies have in common is that they are still entirely
dependent on language as a symbol system, either directly in the transmission
of the spoken word or as mediated through the written word, the alphabet
being mediated again via Morse code. For all of these media, communication
remains dependent on the verbal report. This is why the adoption of televi-
sion after the Second World War is the point at which the electronic media
fully become the dominant media of the culture; this is the transition that
McLuhan (1964) and Postman (1979, 1982, 1985) both emphasize as being
the most radically transformative. With television, language takes a back seat
to the image, as the medium allows us to see what is happening for ourselves,
as it is happening. The verbal report is no longer the main source of informa-
tion, instead being reduced to commentary, coming after the fact of seeing
the images for ourselves. Radio can go beyond a report to the extent that the
event can be perceived aurally, for example, in broadcasting a concert, but for
the most part, the listener must wait for the reporter’s description. The differ-
ence between a televised experience and a report can be seen in a sports pro-
gram, as Ong (1967, p. 316) points out: “The voice on a live television sports
broadcast lags behind the audience’s perceptions.” The vocal report is actually
expendable on television, as experiments in football broadcasts have shown.
Ong also argues that the sense of immediacy is central to the television form:
“Not all television presentations are simultaneous with reality, but, in a way,
all television presentations seem to be; the fact that the instrument is capable
of such presentations defines its impact” (p. 316). Whereas the motion pic-
ture, for example, communicates in the past tense, the television broadcast
communicates in the present tense and, therefore, fully realizes the potential
of telegraphy for instantaneous communication and, beyond that, what we
might refer to as virtual presence. In sum, television brings together and merg-
es the separate strands of photography and telegraphy that Postman (1985)
identified as pivotal in establishing the Age of Show Business.
The impact of the televisual synthesis so radically altered American cul-
ture that a generation gap opened up between the Baby Boomers who grew
up with television and their parents who did not, a gap much wider than the
current distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants. McLuhan
(1964) identified television as the key factor involved in the major cultural
disruptions associated with the sixties and early seventies, including the youth
movement and the rise of the counterculture, the civil rights and antiwar
movement, and Watergate. Elaborating on this, Postman’s student Joshua
Meyrowitz (1985) has argued that increased access to information has led to
dissolving boundaries between social roles, such as the masculine and the fem-
inine, and childhood and adulthood. Along similar lines, Postman’s colleague
Henry Perkinson (1991) has argued that the audiovisual encoding of televi-
sion, along with its immediacy and increased access to information, has made
us more moral, in that images of injustice invoke an emotional response in
ways that the distancing effect of print does not. Postman would not deny the
fact that television has had positive effects on our culture, but takes the posi-
tion that the costs outweigh the benefits. Given the fact that the American
republic and the democratic ideals and practices it is associated with emerged
out of a typographic media environment, the question Postman raises is, can
this culture survive in the new media environment established in the second
half of the 20th century? And his answer is that the prospects for the future do
not appear to be very good. Television’s immediacy, along with its concrete-
ness and presentational rather than propositional symbolic form, constitutes
the basis for Ong’s (1967) argument that “television blurs the fictional with
the real on a scale previously inconceivable” (p. 315). Other boundaries are
blurred as well, notably between the public and the private, both concepts
associated with literacy and print. Television is also characterized by discon-
tinuity, in part due to the legacy of the telegraph in speeding up communica-
tion, establishing instantaneous transmission, and creating a bias towards the
nonlinear, and in part due to the legacy of photography, with its presentation-
al content, and its lack of clear sequential order. As Sontag (1977) argues, the
photograph replaces history with nostalgia, substituting consumable objects
for coherent narrative. This is mitigated somewhat, but not entirely, by the
motion picture, which allows for a degree of linear narrative, and by radio,
which relies on verbal communication to a large extent. But discontinuity
reigns on television, whether it is via commercial interruptions which turn
narrative into a series of disconnected fragments, surrounded by a sequence of
unrelated short segments, or through the more recent habit of watching tele-
vision with a remote control in hand, channel surfing through the extended
offerings of cable and satellite services. And more simply, it is exhibited in the
fast pace of cutting used for most television content, which helps to keep the
viewer’s attention through constant stimulation. The result is, again, incoher-
ence and a degraded form of discourse that grabs our attention, but is empty
of significant content.
Over the four decades between the beginning of the postwar period and
the publication of Amusing Ourselves to Death, the American media environ-
ment continued to evolve. During the 1950s, television was almost univer-
sally adopted, becoming a fixture in American living rooms. Towards the end
of that decade, magnetic videotape was first used to broadcast prerecorded
programs. During the sixties, the innovation of communications satellites
made it possible to transmit live television from anywhere on the planet, fully
realizing McLuhan’s (1962) notion of a global village. Color television was also
introduced during the sixties, adding a new dimension of realism and visual
attraction to the televisual image. The overall quality of television sets and
broadcast signals continued to improve, sets became smaller, easier to move,
and perhaps most significantly, television sets multiplied within households.
Whereas television had been mainly living room furniture, and therefore its
conditions of attendance made it a family-oriented medium at first, as mul-
tiple sets migrated into the rest of the home, and especially the bedrooms of
individuals, including both parents and children, the time spent watching
television increased, and the mediation of programming via social contexts
decreased, increasing the direct impact of the medium on the individual.
Also, programming options increased as far as was possible within the confines
of the broadcast medium by using all available frequencies and broadcasting
24 hours a day. All of these changes represent an amplification of television’s
power as a medium, but at the same time, its basic characteristics had not
changed dramatically over this period.
At the time that Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), tele-
vision had become a mature medium, and almost entirely environmental and
invisible. Most scholars and intellectuals were paying exclusive attention to
its content, some as well to the creators of that content and the corporate
organizations behind them, some to the ways in which audiences interpreted
the content, but almost no one to the medium itself. McLuhan (1964) had
largely been rejected or forgotten at this point, a point that Postman brings up
in relation to his argument that the shift from print to television drastically
alters the character of public discourse:
If all of this sounds suspiciously like Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, the medium is
the message, I will not disavow the association (although it is fashionable to do so
among respectable scholars who, were it not for McLuhan, would today be mute).
I met McLuhan thirty years ago when I was a graduate student and he an unknown
English professor. I believed then, as I believe now, that he spoke in the tradition of
Orwell and Huxley—that is, as a prophesier, and I have remained steadfast to his
teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for
conversation. (p. 8)
The relative stability of the television-dominated media environment of the

1980s made it difficult to recognize the medium as having an impact inde-
pendent of its content, but that same stability facilitated the analysis of the
nature and effects of the medium. Whereas McLuhan in 1964 could only offer
tentative probes, as he referred to them, Postman two decades later was able
to draw certain conclusions about television’s impact. But that stability was
short-lived, as the medium has continued to evolve over the ensuing decades,
notably through the increasing adoption of cable and satellite television de-
livery services, making broadcast television increasingly less significant, and
the recent transition to digital broadcasting and high definition displays. Per-
haps most significant of all is the great increase in the number of channels
and sources of content available to the viewer through cable, satellite, and
the Internet, and the availability of on-demand services. While the medium
continues to change, Postman’s critical analysis of television does not rest on
the scarcity of its offerings due to the limitations of broadcasting or the poor
quality of the analog broadcast signal in comparison to contemporary digi-
tal transmission. Indeed, Postman took the position that we would be better
off with less television, not more, and in speaking to audiences in Europe,
where governments had maintained strong control over broadcasting rather
than turning it over to private enterprise, he warned them against following
America’s example (see Postman, 1988). With state control of broadcast-

ing, governments imposed limits on television in regard to the type, quali-
ty, and amount of content, being concerned with the public interest rather
than maximizing audiences and profits. And while this does raise concerns
about government control and censorship, Postman (1988) notes that private
broadcasting also amounts to control over television by corporate interests.
Indeed, to best exploit the medium, private enterprise gives free rein to its
attention-centered bias towards attractive visuals, dramatic presentations,
excitement, novelty, and content that is easy to digest and above all enter-
taining, even if such content may be harmful in some way to the public and
to the culture.
But the expansion of television continues unabated, and is only part of
the story of how the media environment has changed since 1985. During the
1980s, the personal computer became increasingly popular, during the 1990s
the Internet and the web exploded into popular consciousness, and during
the first decade of the 21st century, social media became the next big thing,
followed by mobile devices. Postman addressed some of these changes in Tech-
nopoly (1992), noting that
technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley out-
lined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them im-
moral. It does not even make then unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore
irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family,
by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit
its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy. (p. 48)
According to Postman, this happened only in America (a position that may

be debatable), and began early in the 20th century with Frederick Taylor’s
system of scientific management. As Ellul (1965) argues, technology and
technique are about finding the most efficient means to any given end, and in
a technopoly, efficiency is the only value that is taken seriously. If you want
to save the rain forest, for example, successful arguments need to be framed
along the lines of the rain forest as an efficient manufacturer of oxygen for the
planet, or an efficient biological factory for the production of new pharmaceu-
ticals. Arguing that it is important to save the rain forest because such preser-
vation is intrinsically good or because it is part of God’s creation simply will
not be very effective. And consider the outcry when George W. Bush placed
limitations on stem cell research on moral grounds; opponents explained that
this would impede progress in the curing of diseases and disabilities. Even
if you agree with Obama’s decision to reverse that policy, it is important to

acknowledge that it represents a triumph of the technological imperative. For
more on the political and moral implications of Postman’s Technopoly, Donald
N. Wood has published two cogent discussions on the future of democracy,
Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy (1996), and The Unraveling of
the West (2003), while Peter Fallon, another student of Postman’s, considers
technology’s ethical implications in The Metaphysics of Media (2010).
In part, Technopoly (1992) answers critics of Amusing Ourselves to Death
(1985) who agreed with Postman’s identification of the symptoms, but ar-
gued that it is our economic and political arrangements, rather than televi-
sion as a medium, that constitute the root cause of our inability to engage in
serious public discourse. Advertising, however, serves as propaganda for the
technological society as consumer products and services are themselves tech-
nologies, and advertising’s general message is to promote technological solu-
tions to all of the problems and needs that confront us. And in Technopoly,
Postman shows how technological determinism is not inevitable, and not a
general theory of history, but rather a specific condition we have entered into
by willfully, if not entirely consciously, abrogating our responsibility to place
checks and controls over technological innovation and to preserve and main-
tain tradition and humanistic values. Television, then, has had the effect it
has because we have allowed the medium to take control of our lives and
our culture. And the same is true of the newer information technologies that
Postman saw introduced during the eighties and early nineties. Technopoly
also is concerned with information overload, as too much information over-
whelms our capacity to process it, evaluate it, or otherwise make sense of it.
Too much information leads to a loss of coherence and a loss of belief in any
transcendent values, myths, or ideologies, which are needed to hold a society
together. As a complement to Amusing Ourselves to Death, on various occa-
sions circa 1990 Postman gave an address entitled “Informing Ourselves to
Death,” where he explained
I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the most misery
and pain—at both cultural and personal levels—has nothing to do with the sort of
information made accessible by computers. The computer and its information can-
not answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives
more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral
framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a
means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency
eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a
magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront—spir-
itual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future.
Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine.
But it is presented to us, with trumpets blaring … as a technological messiah. (n.p.)
Here Postman specifically addresses the computer as technology and medium,

arguing that we need to be wary of technology boosters who ask us to accept
new technologies uncritically, promoting them as pure benefit without any
cost. And he notes that all of the new media of the eighties and nineties seem
to be trying to persuade consumers to adopt them because they will give them
access to more information than they previously had available, lack of infor-
mation being a problem that was solved long ago.
Whereas technocracy can be understood as an outgrowth of print culture,
technopoly follows the speeding up of society associated with the electronic
media, specifically the telegraph and the wireless. Speed and efficiency are
closely allied, both being strongly associated with numeracy and measure-
ment. As noted, the development of mathematics was dependent on systems
of notation, and closely associated with writing and the alphabet. According
to Hobart and Schiffman (1998), the knowledge explosion brought on by the
printing revolution required new methods of managing information, leading
to the invention of calculus by Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton in the
17th century. The communications revolution of the 19th century could like-
wise be seen as leading to George Boole’s algebraic logic in 1854, Boolean
logic laying the foundation for Claude Shannon’s information theory in the
mid-20th century, and with it computer science. Similarly, Beniger (1986) ar-
gues that the Industrial Revolution made it necessary to develop technologies
and techniques to help manage the new mechanical technologies, leading to
what he termed the control revolution. For example, we cannot underestimate
the significance of Herman Hollerith’s invention of a mechanical tabulator
based on punched cards. First used to tabulate the 1890 census, it finished
the job in one year, whereas the 1880 census data had taken eight years to
process by hand. Hollerith’s company was one of three that merged to form
International Business Machines, which became the leading manufacturer
of computers during the 20th century. Over the course of the 20th century,
through advances in mathematics and mechanics, there was a growing trend
towards the quantification of the world, which especially accelerated with
the development of digital computers starting in the 1940s. Perkinson (1996)
argued that computer-based quantification has made us a risk-aversive society,
insofar as it continually identifies new risks that are impossible to completely
eliminate. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman (1985) mentions in passing

“the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification” (p. 23), and in
Technopoly (1992) his critique of scientism includes “the misapplication of
techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing
to say” (p. 161).
I have previously suggested that Postman’s two strands of criticism, of
amusing and informing ourselves to death, of television and the computer,
entertainment and information, can be understood as an attack on linguistic
communication from two different extremes (Strate, 1994, 2011). Against
the balance between orality and literacy, between speech and writing, that
was achieved during the Age of Typography, we now face what Ellul (1985)
deemed the humiliation of the word. Ellul’s critique followed lines similar
to Amusing Ourselves to Death, in arguing against the threat posed by image
culture, which among other things serves as an extension of propaganda. But
Ellul’s main critique has been of the technological imperative and efficien-
cy, which is, again, a numbers game, and quantification represents another
symbol system that has dethroned the word. We are left with two extremes
of hyperreality and hyperrationality, the image keeping us entertained while
behind the scenes society is run according to the numbers, leaving no room
for qualitative, humanistic evaluation. We return once again to the problem
of a loss of balance, the relative balance achieved in the Age of Typography
but lost in the Age of Television and Technopoly.
The end of the Age of Typography does not mean that individuals within
our new media environment no longer read and write, but print has become
what Postman called a “residual epistemology” (1985, p. 28), subordinate to
the electronic media, and to some extent altered and polluted by them; this
is not to mention the rapid decline of the publishing industry in recent years.
Some have held out the hope that the personal computer and the Internet
would restore some balance due to the early emphasis on text-based interfaces
and communications, that the web would lead to a revolution in personal pub-
lishing, and that social media would create a new kind of virtual public sphere
(see, for example, Levinson, 1999, 2013), and in the Foreword I noted some
of the genuine benefits they have provided. But building on Postman’s critical
approach, it seems clear that what these media often provide us with is a new
version of telegraphic discourse, rather than the exposition that Postman val-
ued. Reading electronic text tends to follow the attention-centered pattern
of jumping from one short segment to another via scanning or hyperlinks.
Linearity is one casualty of this form of expression, along with coherence.
The reversion of written work to scribal norms, insofar as texts are no longer
fixed in print and can be easily altered and updated, provides certain advan-
tages in the ability to correct errors, collaborate, and update (another nod to
speed), but is also a blow to coherence in the loss of stability of texts. The fact
that Wikipedia’s entries compare reasonably well to those of reference works
written by experts distracts from the fact that the real problem with relying on
the site is not that there might be deliberate or unintentional errors, but that
whatever anyone cites from a Wikipedia page can be changed or deleted at
any given moment. In addition, while the interactive and social character of
online writing results in text that is more informal, conversational, a textual
equivalent of secondary orality, it also leads to a loss of quality in content and
style. As Nicholas Carr puts in his Postman-inspired critique of Internet cul-
ture, The Shallows (2010), “our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and
immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence”
(p. 108). Carr goes on to argue
No doubt the connectivity and other features of e-books will bring new delights and
diversions. … But the cost will be a weakening, if not a final severing, of the intimate
intellectual attachment between the lone writer and the lone reader. The practice of
deep reading that became popular in the wake of Gutenberg’s invention… will con-
tinue to fade, in all likelihood becoming the province of a small and dwindling elite.
We will, in other words, revert to the historical norm. (p. 108)
Much has been written about the end of the Gutenberg era, and what is lost
with it is the extent to which individuals relied upon reading and writing for
work and play, and the depth of reading and writing involved. In addition to
the deep reading that Carr (2010) refers to, which is reading that involves
sustained focus and attention over an extended period of time for written
works of extended length (e.g., books as opposed to web pages), we could also
speak of deep writing. Consider the difference between reading a text that was
dictated and written down unedited, and a text that was produced through
a long period of research, drafting, revising, editing, etc. Both texts take the
same amount of time to read, but the deeply written text represents a kind of
condensed time, a distilling of intellectual quality that is unequaled in any
other medium. As Nystrom (1987) argued, the written word is an extension
and an expression of pure thought, pure mind. It is as close to mind reading as
we may ever get.
But the mind itself is not unaffected by all this. Perhaps what is most
startling of all is the fact that research in recent years has demonstrated that
brain structure and function are altered by the acquisition of literacy, and the
effects vary according to the type of writing system used. As Maryanne Wolf
relates in Proust and the Squid (2007):
Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when read-
ing takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and
intellectually. For example, at the neuronal level, a person who learns to read in
Chinese uses a very particular set of neuronal connections that differ in significant
ways from the pathways used in reading English. When Chinese readers first try to
read in English, their brains attempt to use Chinese-based neuronal pathways. The
act of learning to read Chinese characters has literally shaped the Chinese reading
brain. Similarly, much of how we think and what we think about is based on insights
and associations generated from what we read. (p. 5)
Research has also shown that working with television and computer screens
alters brain structure and function, so that, for example, experienced comput-
er users engaged in a Google search utilize a neural network that, according
to physician Gary Small and his co-author Gigi Vorgan (2008), includes the
area of the brain that
controls our ability to make decisions and integrate complex information. It also
controls our mental process of integrating sensations and thoughts, as well as working
memory, which is our ability to keep information in mind for a very short time—just
long enough to manage an Internet search task or dial a phone number after getting
it from directory assistance. (pp. 16–17)
They go on to note that “our high-tech revolution has plunged us into a state
of continuous partial attention” (p. 18), a state in which we are not focusing
on anything in our environment, but constantly being on alert and moni-
toring our gadgets for incoming messages and data. It is a state of mind even
more diffused than multitasking, one in which we are constantly looking for
the stimulation that new information brings. Howard Rheingold (2012) notes
that when we receive and open a new message, we tend to hold our breath,
a biological fight or flight response. And much of our activity online can be
likened to an electronic form of hunting and gathering, activating parts of
the brain and body that long ago fell into disuse. Here, too, McLuhan (1964)
intuited that we had become hunters and gatherers in the electronic age, see-
ing in television the larger potential of electronic media for involvement and
participation. But it comes at a cost, as Sherry Turkle explains in Alone To-
gether (2011), as we divide our attention and thereby dilute our relationships
with each other. While social media and mobile technologies increase the
potential for connection in many ways, they do not necessarily improve our
ability to take part in meaningful dialogue with each other (see also Maushart,
2011; Rose, 2003; Sternberg, 2012).
The effects of the electronic media on our brains and intellectual capacity
and on our interpersonal relationships are indeed significant, and Postman
would certainly want us to be aware of and concerned about them. But his
main concern was with the nature of public discourse, the health of our cul-
ture, and the future of our society. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Tech-
nopoly (1992), The End of Education (1995), and Building a Bridge to the 18th
Century (1999), he returns time and again to the ideals of the Enlightenment
that gave birth to the American republic, and asks us to consider whether the
democracy born out of print culture and a reverence for the word can survive
in the era of electronic media. Or perhaps rather than can it survive, the ques-
tion we need to ask is, did it survive?
PART TWO
·5·
breaking the news
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman famously singled out the phrase “Now
this…” as emblematic of the incoherence of television news. “Now this…”
was a segue commonly used by newscasters to create a transition and link
together two completely unrelated segments, either between news stories that
had absolutely nothing to do with one another in content or emotional tone,
or worse yet, between a news report and a commercial advertisement. If you
are not familiar with this phrase or if you have not heard it used for many years
now, you can credit Postman for having shamed broadcasters into abandoning
this shallow attempt to disguise the discontinuity inherent in their mode of
presentation. But while “Now this…” may have fallen into disuse, the bias it
reflects persists even as our media environment has evolved.
In 1985, television news was dominated by the big three network anchors,
Dan Rather of CBS, Tom Brokaw of NBC, and Peter Jennings of ABC. While
not considered to be quite of the same caliber as broadcast news pioneers
Edward R. Murrow, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite,
the last often being hailed as the most trusted man in America, their successors
brought a degree of stability to network news programming for the last two de-
cades of the 20th century. Summing up the news of the day in a half-hour eve-
ning program that included eight minutes worth of commercial interruptions,
they served as the main source of news for the American public. PBS broadcast
its own alternative, the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour; twice as long as the other
programs and minus any breaks for advertising, this relatively high quality
newscast attracted an audience that Postman (1985) aptly described as “min-
iscule” (p. 106). A slightly larger late-night audience tuned in to Nightline, an
important supplement to the network news, hosted by Ted Koppel; launched
in 1979, the program provided a half hour of focused coverage and discussion
of a single issue, albeit still disrupted by commercials.
Almost thirty years later, network news is in decline. With the addition
of 24-hour cable news networks and online news sites, evening news programs
have lost their centrality in American culture. Postman might have welcomed
this development if something better had taken their place. And even if it had,
it would be at the cost of losing an important part of the shared information
environment that bound together the nation in the early days of television. It
was through that shared environment that we mourned together as a nation fol-
lowing the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby
Kennedy, that public outrage against segregation and other forms of inequali-
ty gave the civil rights movement the support it needed, that revelations that
the government has been misleading the public turned the country against the
Vietnam War, and that we experienced the shame and indignation of Water-
gate and the Iranian hostage crisis (Meyrowitz, 1985; Perkinson, 1991). And
however problematic the nature of television news might have been in the
1980s, it has only become more so due to budget cuts over the ensuing decades,
and the fact that the anchors who replaced Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings have
not necessarily had the same background in hard journalism.
Perhaps the most controversial move was made by CBS in 2006 in mak-
ing Katie Couric the anchor for their evening news program. Dan Rather had
resigned the previous year following a scandal involving a story about George
W. Bush’s National Guard service. The story was based on documents said to
have come from Bush’s squadron commander, which a blogger argued had to
be a forgery, since they were printed in a proportional font that was not in
common use until the mid-nineties, while Bush finished his service in 1973
(note the role that new media played here in criticizing mass media). Rather
and his staff were unable to authenticate the documents, a major embarrass-
ment for the anchor and the network. CBS turned to Couric, after a brief
interim with Bob Schieffer at the helm, in an effort to regain their audience
and, in particular, to attract younger viewers. Couric became the first woman
to anchor a network evening news program alone, and the fact that women
breaking the news 87
have had difficulty breaking into broadcast news is well known. Beyond the
standard brand of sexism existing in most occupations, in the past executives
believed that audiences would not take women newscasters seriously because
their voices are not deep enough. In other words, the criterion for seriousness
was a dramatic one, not one based on the ability to speak logically and coher-
ently. And while women were able to overcome this prejudice, we still find
that male anchors and reporters often have a low-pitched voice. Couric had
more to overcome than any residual gender bias, however, having spent most
of her career doing lightweight work on NBC’s morning program, the Today
show, where she had established an image of being perky that ran counter to
the character type expected of an anchor. Whether she was well qualified for
the anchor chair is a matter of some debate, but then again the same might
be said of Brian Williams, who succeeded Brokaw at NBC. Almost certainly,
there were others better qualified, who were not chosen because they were not
considered sufficiently televisual. But television giveth and television taketh
away, and the perky image that made Couric so successful on Today made for
a very difficult transition. Thus, after five years of low ratings, which indicated
that she was miscast for this particular role, she left CBS.
By way of contrast, note that despite the sexism that existed in the past,
women could and did appear in print, enjoyed great success in the literary
world, and if need be, could use a pseudonym to disguise their gender, so that
the only thing they would be judged by is the quality of their writing. By the
same token, race is not immediately apparent in print, but becomes an issue
when appearing before the television camera. Notably, when the first cable
television news network, CNN, was launched in 1980, an African American,
Bernard Shaw, was chosen as principal anchor, a groundbreaking move for
televised news, albeit one that did not have all that much impact given the
fact that cable television had not been widely adopted at that point. It is also
interesting to note that ever since Connie Chung’s brief stint as co-anchor of
the CBS evening news program in the 1990s, broadcasters have felt comfort-
able with Asian American women taking a prominent role in newscasting
based on their stereotype as intelligent and serious. Other factors come into
play, such as age, which has worked against women more than men in the past
and still does to some extent. Weight also matters on television, as heavy-set
individuals tend to be relegated to side roles as commentators. Strangely, head
size is another factor for the television camera, as given the way the cam-
eras work, and the emphasis on tight shots, including close-ups, individuals
with larger-than-average heads tend to come across well on television, more
so than in real life. Being photogenic and/or telegenic does not necessarily
mean that an individual is especially attractive under direct scrutiny, hence
the phrase, the camera loves you! Also, hair makes a difference—can you name
one bald news anchor? Overall, audiences like to look at attractive people,
and that is whom, with few exceptions, we see on television news: individuals
who are attractive, but not too attractive, as their good looks cannot be seen
as compromising the serious image that they need to convey.
As a visual medium, one that favors tight shots that bring us up close and
personal, television elicits parasocial relationships, in which we experience
the illusion of an intimate relationship with a real person, and this is encour-
aged by parasocial interaction, as when broadcasters address us in a personal
manner (Horton & Wohl, 1956). Anchors do this in a somewhat formal man-
ner, but the relatively close shots bring them into informal, personal space
(Hall, 1966), and they speak to us as individuals, not as a crowd. The same
mode of address is characteristic of sportscasters and the hosts of talk shows,
game shows, and reality television. On television news, the anchors are the
stars of the show, and as on-camera personalities, what counts is their credibil-
ity, which is based on performance, the quality of their acting according to the
role they are assigned. This retrieves a characteristic of oral cultures, in which
the evaluation of an individual’s message would have to take into account
the person’s ethos, the character and reputation of the individual (Aristotle,
1954). Writing literally made it possible to separate the message from the mes-
senger, eventually revealing the ad hominem fallacy, but audiovisual modes of
communication bring back the ad hominem with a vengeance.
The television newscast is a show, making it a form of show business,
broadcast from a set, one designed to relay a sense of seriousness of purpose, of
busy reporters gathering information while employing cutting-edge technolo-
gy, and while there may be genuine work going on in the background, it takes
place on a stage with scenery and props that set designers have created to con-
vey a certain impression on the audience. Newscasters read from teleprompt-
ers; make-up, wardrobe and hair are all carefully managed, and occasionally,
the anchors may go on location for a shoot. Location is commonplace enough
for field reporting, with the actual place often serving as nothing more than
window dressing, simply to show that the reporter is on the scene, but without
providing any information whatsoever beyond what is said by the reporter, a
report that could have been conveyed from anywhere. In this way, setting too
is used to generate credibility, as opposed to any logic and evidence provided
by the report itself. In the control room, special effects that seem straight out
of Industrial Light & Magic are regularly employed, the most advanced being
introduced during election night coverage. Moreover, Postman (1985) poses
the question, why do news programs need theme music?
Local news programs are notorious for their willingness to accommodate
themselves to television’s bias towards entertainment, with news teams that
mirror the structure of family sitcoms, complete with snappy banter. The dull
content of local political proceedings takes a back seat to scandal and gossip,
especially involving celebrities, which serves the stations much better in at-
tracting audiences. And what is most effective of all in getting the viewers’
attention is crime reporting, a point brought home by Eric Goodman’s Thus
Spoke the Spectacle in a YouTube video aptly named Now… This. Warnings
about threats to health and safety also are emphasized, making fear a primary
appeal for the local news, and thereby playing a major role in making us a
risk-aversive society (Perkinson, 1996).
Local news is perhaps the worst offender, but network and cable news pro-
grams also select and prioritize content based on audience appeal and especially
on visual appeal, as opposed to prioritizing based on importance of the subject
matter and logical arrangement of content. The industry adage, if it bleeds, it leads,
sums up the priority system at work in televising the news. If there is good video
to play, that will take precedence over other criteria for the very reason that it has
the power to attract the viewer’s attention and elicit powerful emotional respons-
es. On top of the distortion of editorial judgment that accompanies the if it bleeds,
it leads mentality, there is the sheer power of repetition. An event recorded on
video will be played and replayed, over and over again, conferring upon it a sig-
nificance entirely out of proportion with its actual meaning or value, and forcing
audiences to relive traumatic moments over and over again.
The emphasis on the visual in television news leads to a distorted view
of government, for example, in the fact that Congress tends to be relatively
underreported on the network programs and cable news channels; the same
is true of state and local assemblies and councils on local news. It is hard to
capture a large legislative body on the screen, and the process of voting on an
issue is prolonged and almost entirely lacking in the drama that plays so well
on television. We may occasionally see an individual senator or representa-
tive making a speech on the news—not the entire speech, of course, just a
brief sound bite. But we are more likely to see the pseudo-event of a press con-
ference, as that can be arranged for the convenience of reporters and camera
crews, and therefore plays better than a recording of actual Congressional pro-
ceedings. Of course, Congress works within a communication environment
designed to facilitate public address to an audience that is actually present in

the physical space. Such environments, whether it is an amphitheater, lecture
hall, or church, almost never translate well to the television camera, which
prefers the intimacy of the close-up and the two-shot. For this reason, rather
than seeing much of the Senate or the House of Representatives in action, we
tend to instead see more of the president, a single individual that the camera
can focus upon. This presents a highly distorted view of the government, one
in which the balance of power between the three branches is distorted, and
need I add that we almost never see the Supreme Court or hear from its jus-
tices on television? It also transforms the president into our celebrity-in-chief,
not a distant authority figure, but an all-too-familiar face. The lines separating
political leaders and government officials, monarchs and dictators, business
executives, religious leaders, and actors, singers, and other entertainers, dis-
solve on television, as all are reduced to the common denominator of celeb-
rity, and the fascination with fame that drives programs such as Entertainment
Tonight, which is presented as a supplement to the nightly network news, and
TMZ, which is based on a celebrity gossip website. (For more on the subject
of celebrity, see Boorstin, 1978; Strate, 2008b).
The 2001 terrorist attacks of 9/11, especially the destruction of Manhat-
tan’s World Trade Center, is commonly referred to as the most extensively
videotaped disaster in history. Certainly, the video of planes crashing into the
Twin Towers, the enormous gashes in the buildings, the smoke and flames,
and their final collapse are stunning, horrifying images that have been burned
into the public mind. But what is sobering beyond the events is the response
that so many of us had to the video, that it was like watching a movie, one
with extensive special effects depicting wide-scale destruction, like Indepen-
dence Day. While such comments reflect a sense of disbelief about the events,
they also say much about how we relate to video, about the blurring of the
boundaries between fiction and fact, and the fact that the motion picture,
the most sophisticated use of the moving image, becomes the touchstone by
which all other visual media are measured (see Gabler, 1998). Had the terror-
ist attacks come a few years later, coverage of the event would have been even
more extensive, given the video-recording capacity of cell phones.
The fact that almost everyone now carries around with them a mobile de-
vice capable of recording still images and video has been a boon for news me-
dia, and a disaster for photographers and video camera operators. On May 31st,
2013, many were stunned to learn that the Chicago Sun-Times had laid off all
of its full-time photographers, a staff that included a Pulitzer Prize winner and
other highly respected photojournalists. The cost of a citizenry armed with dig-
ital cameras is the loss of professional news photography. But the greater loss is
the way in which all of these amateur images and recordings drive out verbal
discourse. It is one thing to upload recordings to YouTube, quite another for
news media to rely on YouTube for their footage and to devote increasingly
more time to airing these amateur videos. This is especially apparent on cable
news channels in recent years, especially for events that occur unexpectedly,
like natural disasters. With the combination of amateur footage and official re-
cordings made available from surveillance sources such as cameras affixed to
police cars and on roads and highways, the caught on camera genre has become
a new kind of news program, one whose only rationale is to collect and present
video clips that would attract the attention and interest of viewers. In this way,
journalism is reduced to a spin-off of America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Ironically, more text is used now than ever before on television and cable
news, but in a position that is subordinate to that of the image. Major news sto-
ries often are given a catchy name; for example, coverage on 9/11 was relatively
quickly given the title of Attack on America. This provides a certain measure
of comfort in that our ability to name things gives us the impression of control
over them, but this amounts to putting them into a context of no context,
as Postman (1985) would put it. These titles might be likened to a newspa-
per headline, an earlier attention-centered element in print media, but once
the headline was glanced at, the reader would quickly delve into the story, and
the headline would be forgotten, its only purpose being to get the reader to read
the story. The title used by the news program, however, remains on the bottom
of the screen throughout the duration of the report, so that its effect is contin-
ual. And whereas newspaper headlines are used once and discarded, these titles
are reused for as long as the story is repeated, and follow-up reports are aired,
creating a sense of continuity and, again, a context of no context. Beyond the
false sense of coherence that the title provides in framing the story, we can
certainly see in it a contemporary form of telegraphic discourse, abbreviated,
simplified, suggesting that we can understand the event for the most part
through the simplicity of a slogan rather than through extended exposition.
The crisis of 9/11 also led cable news networks to adopt the crawl appear-
ing at the bottom of the screen as an additional source of information. We can
trace the history of this practice back to stock tickers, which combined teleg-
raphy and printing, and were used to disseminate stock price information to
subscribers. Widely adopted in the financial sector from 1870 on, this medium
was eventually made obsolete by the Internet. Electronically displayed news
tickers first appeared on the exterior of buildings, notably the headquarters of

The New York Times in 1928, and on broadcast television, news tickers were
used occasionally to provide information about important events that did not
quite merit interrupting the broadcast. The permanent crawl was introduced
by specialized financial networks on cable television, such as the Financial
News Network and CNBC (which took over FNN in 1991) and, like the orig-
inal stock tickers, was devoted to the display of market activity. This format
was adopted following 9/11 so that viewers just tuning in could quickly learn
about the latest developments: this was a unique time in which citizens need-
ed and wanted information. Although the actual information that could be
provided was limited, the crawl was certainly justified. But once the crisis was
over, the news ticker remained, as it continued to serve the purpose of hold-
ing viewers’ attention, so that they are less likely to change the channel. The
crawl itself is another example of telegraphic discourse, essentially a headline
service. This is fine for a list of stock market prices, which after all is pure in-
formation, but does not provide the viewer with any explanation or context
for the fragmented news moving across the bottom of the screen. It also bears
little or no relation to the main content conveyed on the screen, presenting
the viewer with entirely different messages simultaneously, dividing our atten-
tion. It therefore serves to present a nonlinear and incoherent picture of the
day’s events and potentially a sense of information overload.
At the time that Amusing Ourselves to Death was published (1985), one
of the frequently cited explanations for the inability of television news to
provide any kind of in-depth coverage of events was the fact that evening
news programs were limited to less than half an hour. The idea of an entire
channel devoted to 24-hour news coverage seemed to suggest the possibility
of overcoming the inadequacies of broadcast news. This began with CNN in
1980, which operated alone and in relative obscurity until 1991, when it be-
came the only network to provide live reports from Baghdad at the start of the
Persian Gulf War. Having demonstrated that a cable news network could be
relatively successful in attracting audiences, CNN was joined in 1996 by two
competitors, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel. With increased adoption
of cable systems and the expansion of channel capacity, cable options became
increasingly more popular, and, again, 9/11 proved to be an important turn-
ing point, as New York-based network news broadcasting was disrupted, and
24-hour cable news coverage answered the great need we all felt for ongoing
monitoring of the situation and its aftermath. This accelerated a process that
was already occurring in a more gradual fashion—the dispersal of the audience
for the evening network news programs, and the decline of the big three net-
work news organizations, CBS, NBC, and ABC. The new big three, CNN,
Fox, and MSNBC, did not so much replace the old triad—ratings on cable
cannot compare to those for network television—but rather signaled a new
era and a new mode of journalism.
But what did the cable news networks do with the unprecedented oppor-
tunity to provide 24-hour news programming? In regard to news reporting, the
answer is more of the same. As it turns out, most people tune in to the cable sta-
tions only for a limited time, so rather than lose viewers, they tend to provide
repetition in place of depth, as anyone who watches one of these stations for
more than half an hour or so can attest. The news stories themselves are kept
short, again out of concern of losing the audience’s attention. Video footage
is often emphasized, and the anchors and newscasters on cable are even more
attractive than their broadcasting counterparts. Of course, it becomes possible
to run counter to the bias of the television medium. An excellent example is
C-SPAN (Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network), which provides coverage
of federal government proceedings, including gavel-to-gavel coverage of the
proceedings of the United States Congress. C-SPAN certainly demonstrates
the potential of cable television to serve the function of monitoring the polit-
ical environment, but like the PBS Newshour with which it shares its public
service orientation, C-SPAN’s audience is miniscule.
Working in a contrary direction, cable’s big three have discovered that
they can attract larger audiences by providing more entertaining program-
ming, essentially building on the formats established by the networks. But in
regard to content, they have also diverged significantly from the networks’
attempt to appeal to the largest possible audience by avoiding any appearance
of political bias. Fox led the way with its blatant appeal to the Republican
Party and the conservative side of the political spectrum. MSNBC responded
by taking up the liberal cause, and identifying itself with the Democratic Par-
ty. In the face of this bifurcation of the audience, CNN tried to position itself
as the network of the people, but in the face of falling ratings, has recently
turned to increasingly lightweight and sensational content. While objectivity
in journalism was always an ideal that fell short of reality, there had been a
sense of public service that went with the journalists’ attempts to withhold
their own opinions and prejudices as they provided a descriptive account of
events. It is a cliché to ridicule Fox’s “fair and balanced” slogan as a seemingly
cynical attempt to promote themselves as the opposite of what they really
are, but we can see this development as another manifestation of postliterate,
post-typographic culture. The ideal of objectivity was closely associated with

modern science and the idea that individuals could remove themselves from
the object of their study. This removal of the personal reflects the character-
istics of the print medium, where not even the personal touch of handwrit-
ing remains. While critics have long argued that journalism’s false image of
objectivity serves to mystify its role in transmitting dominant ideology, the
strong political leanings of Fox and MSNBC do not provide much in the way
of needed context, analysis, or explanation of the issues of the day. What the
cable news networks give us instead is opinion. Expert opinions. Insider opin-
ions. Pundit opinions. This is not ideology in the original sense of the print
media, in publications of party platforms and manifestos, or in the partisan
press. It is not an integrated system of ideas, but rather an expression of politi-
cal bias, usually against members of the other party. Indeed positions taken by
the opposition are vilified, even when they are the same positions previously
taken by members of the other side. As Postman (1985) argues,
We are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the “Now… this” world of news—a world
of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or
to the future, or to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished.
And so, perforce, has contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply
disappears. And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what
the President says now and what he said then? (p. 110)
In 1985, it was the public that did not seem to care about contradictions in
the statements made by political leaders, a situation that broadcast journalists
found frustrating and confusing. Nearly three decades later, the criterion of
consistency, another manifestation of print culture, is no longer a consider-
ation for many cable news personalities. It is even necessary to qualify the
concept of opinion itself. Recall that the First Amendment’s guarantees of
freedom of the press and speech were originally intended to insure the pos-
sibility of an open exchange of opinions and viewpoints. Based on logic and
reason, and appeals to evidence, there would be a free marketplace of ideas,
the foundation of informed deliberation, out of which educated, thinking in-
dividuals would be able to determine the best course of action. The expression
and exchange of opinion were to be the beginning of a conversation and a
search for truth, the goal being either the determination of facts (if they are
in dispute) and/or the determination of policy, possibly based on negotiated
settlement. Now compare this to the “discussion” (if you can call it that) that
typically takes place on cable news programs, where opinions are often based
on emotion rather than reason, and it is all about taking sides, about winners
and losers, rather than achieving compromise. Individuals typically appear on
these programs prepared with talking points that they insist on getting across,
with no real intent to listen and consider what the other person is saying, and
perhaps seek out common ground, let alone a resolution.
In our postmodern culture, expressions of opinion do not lead to resolu-
tion, agreement, or even negotiation; instead, they end with, you have your
opinion, and I have mine, and that is that. Stating our opinions is no longer the
start of a conversation; now it is the end of all dialogue. And what matters
most of all is the disagreement, the conflict. Television is a dramatic medium,
and conflict provides an exciting form of content, the verbal equivalent of
the former World Wrestling Federation, aptly renamed a decade ago World
Wrestling Entertainment. This is seen most emphatically in the evening talk
programs featured on the cable networks, most successful of all being Bill
O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Factor. In this aspect of cable news, we see a return to one
aspect of oral culture, which Ong (1982) describes as agonistically toned, fa-
voring struggle among various agents, both physical and verbal.
Of course, nothing brings in viewers like breaking news, a live story un-
folding in front of the cameras. This is particularly valuable for a 24-hour news
channel, but there are only so many real events to go around, so much of what
constitutes breaking news or news updates are events of no major consequence,
and often events that are really pseudo-events, such as a press conference. And
there is a great rush to be the first to break the story or the newest little bit of in-
formation, with the understanding that viewers may be switching from channel
to channel or may be guided to another channel through their divided atten-
tion shared with social media. For example, two days after the Boston Marathon
bombing on April 15, 2013, first CNN and then Fox issued reports about an
arrest that proved to be false, their example followed by the Associated Press,
the Boston Globe newspaper, and some of Boston’s local television stations. Af-
ter being reprimanded by the FBI, retractions were issued, but no mention was
made of the absence of one of the most fundamental elements of journalism:
fact checking. Even more telling was the mistake made by CNN and Fox on June
28, 2012, when the Supreme Court delivered its historic ruling on President
Obama’s Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, reporting that the court had
struck down the individual mandate at the center of his healthcare reform. The
reason why they got the story wrong was because they had reported on the de-
cision before reading the entire document, which began by explaining that the
act could not be justified based on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution,
but eventually stated that it could be supported as a form of taxation. I think

this is worth emphasizing. Two of the three cable news networks got the story
completely wrong because they did not bother to read the entire Supreme Court
decision before reporting on it! I would like to think that MSNBC’s restraint in
this matter was due to proper application of the most basic of journalistic pro-
cedures, but I suspect it was connected in some way to the fact that they had
staked out the liberal position in cable news, and were simply reluctant to report
the bad news to their audience.
If Walter Cronkite was once the most trusted man in America, who now
fills that role? No one quite enjoys the centrality in our culture that the CBS
anchor once did, but if anyone comes close, it would have to be comedian Jon
Stewart. Even before his success as host of The Daily Show on cable’s Comedy
Central channel, it became a commonplace that more and more citizens were
getting their news from late night talk show comedy monologues delivered by
the likes of Jay Leno and David Letterman. If so many people now get their
news from comedians, does that mean that journalism has become a joke?
And when it comes to Stewart, in many ways he provides the most incisive
discussion and analysis of the news available today, critiquing politicians and
officials, and journalists alike. If the best journalism on television comes via
comedy programs such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, this certainly
validates Postman’s argument that television is at its best when it provides
entertainment, and cannot help but undermine serious discourse.
It is important to add that we do have access to many more sources of infor-
mation than ever before. In addition to C-SPAN, cable television offers special-
ized channels for financial news, weather reports, and news programming from
around the world. The BBC News is highly regarded and although not free of its
own biases, serves as an alternative to American news sources. But how many
people actually watch it? Al-Jazeera, a privately owned Arab news source, while
again not free from bias, has been hailed for the quality of its English-language
programming, but became controversial when cable provider Comcast refused
to carry the channel, not wanting to offend their conservative audience. They
need not have bothered, as Al-Jazeera’s audience is miniscule, even in compar-
ison to that of PBS, and it is doubtful that their recent purchase of Al Gore’s
unsuccessful Current TV channel will make much difference in audience size.
Beyond cable’s additional offerings, there is a wealth of news available via the
Internet. But the problem we face, again, is not a lack of information, but rather
a need to make sense of it all, to evaluate, separate the wheat from the chaff, put
it all into a coherent context, to synthesize it.
The web has given us news aggregators, such as the Drudge Report, the
Huffington Post, and Google News. These services increase our access to in-
formation and provide reports from multiple sources, but even when the items
are selected by human beings, are they an adequate substitute for the editorial
judgment of professional journalists? We might be even more concerned over
automatic aggregators that work on the basis of algorithms, such as Google
News. On the one hand, with so much information out there, such remedial
media answer a real need (Levinson, 1999, 2013), but they do so at the cost of
human judgment. How do computer programs make qualitative evaluations,
except by translating them into quantitative form, rendering judgment based
on the technical imperative of efficiency. Aggregators are only as good as the
sources from which they take their material, and to invoke a biological met-
aphor, are they acting in symbiotic fashion, supporting the journalistic enter-
prise of their partners, or are they parasites that will eventually kill their hosts?
As traditional news organizations go into decline, what will take their place?
Much has been said about the medium of the blog, which truly has been
revolutionary in many ways, and I say this as a blogger myself. Certainly, blogs
have been instrumental in breaking the monopoly of knowledge held by pro-
fessional journalists and democratizing the dissemination of news and opin-
ion. But more often than not, blogs are expressions of opinion, not fact, and
just add to the cacophony created by cable television’s opinionated program-
ming. And while blogging can be a powerful form of personal expression, in
the absence of gatekeeping, credibility is difficult to gauge. For example, in
2011 a blog entitled A Gay Girl in Damascus was revealed to be a hoax that
was written by a middle-aged man. The fact that it was a fake was conceded
after pictures used in the blog were revealed to have been taken from some-
one else’s Facebook account. Blogs are problematic in regard to individual
credibility, whereas Wikipedia, which functions as a news medium, sometimes
reflecting updates more quickly than standard news sources (Levinson, 2013),
can be unreliable due to the ease with which entries can be edited and revised.
Social news websites such as Digg and Reddit allow for user input, which
adds a democratic element, as individuals can vote items up or down, but this
also substitutes popularity for editorial judgment. Other social news sites like
Slashdot only allow users to submit stories, but what all of these sites have in
common is the mixing of amateur and professional items, to the detriment of
professional standards. Again, there is something to be gained from this brand
of open-source news, but the question that we need to ask is, can it substitute
for professional journalism?
The big two social networks, Facebook and Twitter, excel at the dissemi-
nation of information through social sharing. At their best, they excel at gen-
erating awareness. As one tweet I received some time ago read, Twitter is an
extremely powerful medium for communicating the death of celebrities. Certainly,
it was Twitter and Facebook feeds, accessed via mobile devices, that President
Obama had in mind when he remarked, in regard to the death of Steve Jobs
in 2011, “there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that
much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.” But posting
and sharing links, stories, and videos have been criticized as substitutes for
action, as eliciting emotional responses rather than rational understanding,
and as not being subject to fact checking and other forms of evaluation. A case
in point was the circulation of the Kony 2012 video created by the Invisible
Children organization. Released on March 5, 2012, it quickly went viral and
not only increased awareness about the African war criminal Joseph Kony,
but spurred on some political, military, and financial action on the part of
governments and citizens. But it also was subject to heavy criticism for over-
simplification, serious factual inaccuracies, and elevating Kony to the status
of worldwide celebrity. Ultimately, the story followed the trajectory of a fad
rather than a news story. This is not to discount the positive role that the web
and social networks can play in the dissemination of news, mobilization of
support for a person or cause, and, significantly, in raising funds for charitable
causes. Also of great importance are watchdog sites that fulfill the function
of the fourth estate, notably Andrew Rasiej’s Sunlight Foundation, Ronald
Deibert’s Citizen Lab, and the pioneering Electronic Freedom Foundation,
not to mention the highly controversial WikiLeaks.
Whatever the mixed blessings of the Internet as a medium for news, there
is no question that it has not been kind to the older medium of the newspaper.
Newspapers for the most part at best break even on sales and subscriptions,
and require advertiser support to remain a viable concern. The introduction
of television drove many papers out of business, leaving most cities with only
one or two major dailies that put out fewer and fewer editions over the years.
The Internet is proving to be even more toxic for the publishing industry with
the loss not only of local advertising, but especially of classified advertising
revenue to websites such as Craigslist and Monster.com. At the same time,
young people are no longer picking up the habit of reading the daily paper,
and the commonly heard refrain is, why should I pay to read yesterday’s news
when I can read today’s news for free online? This is where news aggregators, so-
cial news sites, and sharing on social media have caused irreparable damage to
the newspaper medium, and what might have been a slow decline was further
exacerbated by the financial downturn of 2008. Newspaper organizations have
been desperately trying to colonize the web, but it is far from clear whether
the effort will be successful, how many will be able to make the transition,
what the financial model will be (the Wall Street Journal and the New York
Times, among others, have experimented with paywalls for all or some of their
content), or what the final product will look like. While at present newspaper
websites try to recreate some of the mosaic approach of the newspaper, easy
enough given the common formal similarities between the newspaper front
page and the website, but more and more they feel obliged to add blogs and
video to their sites. And this is true of text-based content throughout the web:
As bandwidth steadily increases, more audiovisual content is made available
and garners the most hits and views. Although computers and the Internet
originally held out the hope of a return to the text orientation of print, it has
become more and more apparent that their emphasis will be audiovisual as
well, merging or subsuming television and video to become the true metame-
dium of our culture. In other words, our digital devices and connectivity are
further elaborations of the electronic media environment that retains and in
many ways amplifies the bias towards entertainment. In breaking the news in
this form, Postman (1985) would argue that the news, as a form of essential
public communication, is indeed broken:
Embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticom-

munication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and
rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dada-
ism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of theater,
it is known as vaudeville. (p. 105)
If community is based on communication, are we now in an age of anticommu-

nity? Marshall McLuhan (1962) argued that typography had the unexpected
effect of creating the reading public, which, in turn, forms the basis of modern
democracy. Publishers did not actively have to work at creating a public, it
was simply a by-product of the medium itself. Postman’s student Jay Rosen
(1999) has argued that what journalists need to do today is to actively create
their own publics, practicing what he refers to as public journalism. But is this
possible in a media environment that no longer supports this type of print-
based readership, but rather encourages a new kind of electronic tribalism,
one that includes multiple affiliations and memberships? In some ways, we
may actually be better informed today than we were in 1985, but also more
overloaded with information and less able to filter or evaluate what we re-
ceive. Without a doubt, we also are better entertained than ever before, but
this may make it more difficult than ever to engage in serious discussion and
deliberation, and therefore leaves us poorly equipped to fulfill the obligations
of citizenship in a democracy. If serious discourse is reduced to entertainment,
then it falls to technical experts to take over the administration of our society,
at the cost of individual freedom and true community.
As citizens, we need to have access to enough information to understand
our situation, but not so much as to make it impossible to arrive at an accu-
rate assessment. We need to be able to exchange ideas and opinions in a civil,
respectful manner, subject them to critical evaluation, engage in dialogue and
negotiation in good will, and come to a consensus or otherwise make decisions
about how to respond to the needs of the present and to best work towards our
survival for the future. We are dependent on our media environment to make
all this possible, which suggests that we need to find a way to alter our media
environment, and bring it in line with the needs of a democratic society. The
problem is that we are finding it all too easy to adapt ourselves to its require-
ments, which after all only asks us to sit back and be entertained, or step up
and join in the fun, which, in the end, is the kind of environment depicted by
Huxley in Brave New World (1932).
·6·
the tribe has spoken
The reality TV series Survivor debuted in the United States in the year 2000,
and its slogan, Outwit Outplay Outlast, might well apply to campaigning for
major office in the United States. The other catch phrase from the series, the
tribe has spoken, is uttered following the secret ballot in which the participants
vote one of their number off the island. As such, it serves as a representation
of democracy in action, but a peculiar one, to say the least. For one, actual
tribal societies, being oral cultures, know nothing of democracy. They may be
relatively egalitarian, lacking in the rigid status distinctions that accompany
more complex forms of social organization, but they rely on adherence to tra-
dition and a powerful emphasis on group consensus and conformity, which
after all is essential to survival for such small populations. Leaders earn the
respect that accompanies their authority, and everyone turns to their elders
who, having lived the longest, have the most knowledge and experience; their
long memories provide the context within which the tribe can evaluate their
present situation. Survivor, then, is not so much a retrieval of tribalism, but a
form of neo-tribalism. It does resemble earlier forms of tribalism in that there
is little, if any, concept of privacy, as the contestants are constantly under
surveillance; with few exceptions their every move is observed and recorded.
Within the game, while the players do not have the omniscient access that the
camera seems to grant to the audience, everyone is involved in everyone else’s

business, and everyone takes part in an exchange of gossip and rumor about
one another. The program therefore captures, in a microcosm, McLuhan’s
(1962; McLuhan & Watson, 1970) twin notions of the global village and the
global theater.
But Survivor’s tribalism is inflected with and infected by the individualism
associated with the typographic media environment. Rather than an empha-
sis on group identity as essential to survival, the goal in Survivor is to become
the sole survivor. Its motivating force is competition, not preservation. Still,
it is not so much a form of literate as postliterate culture. It is a reality series
in which, like most examples of the genre, the reality we are shown is high-
ly edited, a televisual reality emphasizing drama and entertainment, rather
than a good faith attempt to objectively recount the events as they unfolded.
Within the game, the contestants are forced to undergo all manner of tests
and hardships, constantly kept in the dark as to what is coming next from the
producers, and encouraged to rely on manipulation and dishonesty to advance
in the competition.
This strange merging of the oral and literate, neither quite one or the
other, captures much of the hybrid energy (McLuhan, 1964) of the electron-
ic media environment, and serves as an excellent metaphor for our political
campaigns. They begin with two rival tribes, Democrats and Republicans.
The tribes compete with one another, but there is also competition within
the tribes in the form of primaries. One by one, the candidates get voted off
the island, until only two remain. Between the two, tribal loyalties often pre-
vail, but judgment is also passed based on what the observers have witnessed.
And in the end, we have one winner, as the host declares, the tribe has spoken.
Another version of democracy in action can be seen on the musical reality se-
ries, American Idol, which debuted in 2002. Its format includes audience vot-
ing once the field has been reduced to 20–40 candidates, utilizing a toll-free
telephone number and text messaging. The results are often controversial, as
popularity does not necessarily correspond to talent. And through the popular
reality series that debuted in 2004, The Apprentice, we are reminded that cor-
porate America has a different, more authoritarian model whenever we hear
Donald Trump utter the words, you’re fired!
That the 21st-century reality television genre resembles political election
campaigns is readily apparent, as is the fact that political election campaigns,
in turn, come across as an inferior form of reality TV, capturing nowhere
near the same level of audience attention and involvement as shows like
the tribe has spoken 103
Survivor, American Idol, and The Apprentice. This is no doubt due to the fact
that elections are not manufactured entirely for the sake of providing con-
tent for television, but the fact remains that campaigns are conducted largely
through the electronic media, and this has transformed politics into a form
that would be unrecognizable to the founders of the American republic or
their 19th-century successors. Postman points to the Lincoln–Douglas debates
of the 1850s as a representative example of political discourse within a me-
dia environment still dominated by typography, events in which the partici-
pants would have at least as half an hour, and as much as three hours, to set
forth their arguments and rebuttals. This is not to discount the carnival-like
atmosphere that surrounded these events, but to note that Americans were
accustomed to a much different form of discourse than is even imaginable
today, and this is borne out by the fact that public lectures and readings were
quite popular in this era. In contrast, anyone at all versed in the formal re-
quirements of debating will tell you that televised “debates” are not in any
traditional sense true debates but only exercises in impression management.
Daniel Boorstin (1978) compared the Kennedy–Nixon debates to quiz
and game shows, the ancestor of contemporary reality television, and the
overall look and format of the typical televised debate resemble the game
show set, albeit minus some of the flashier elements, while some more recent
alternative formats have been based on daytime talk shows like The Oprah
Winfrey Show. Whatever the exact format, the common element is that rather
than being measured in hours, participants’ time allotments are measured in
minutes, in the single digits. A minute or two is sufficient time to state a po-
sition, but it is another form of telegraphic discourse, insufficient to present a
complex argument. Instead, what comes across instead is the look and manner
of the candidates. Famously, Nixon’s unfortunate appearance in the first of the
Kennedy–Nixon debates may have cost him the 1960 election. Perhaps not
surprisingly, he refused to engage in any televised debates during the 1968 and
1972 presidential elections, as did Lyndon Johnson in 1964. It was not until
1976 that the presidential debates resumed, and from that point on became
an established institution.
What was most memorable about the Ford–Carter debates of 1976 were
Ford’s gaffes, notably his statement that, “there is no Soviet domination of
Eastern Europe.” And what was most memorable about the Reagan–Carter
debates of 1980 was Reagan’s slick one-liner, “there you go again.” Gaffes and
one-liners make perfect sound bites, short and entertaining, fitting perfectly
into the abbreviated formats of television news programming, and in this way
their impact is enormously amplified beyond whatever effect they might have
on the actual audience tuning in to the debate, which is never comparable
to audiences for TV’s sitcoms, melodramas, or reality shows. In 1988’s Bush–
Dukakis debates, what stood out was the unemotional response from Mike
Dukakis when CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked him, in regard to the candidate’s
opposition to the death penalty, whether he would change his mind if his
wife, Kitty, were to be raped and murdered. Shaw himself drew criticism for
asking that question, and this would not be the last time that the performance
of the moderators would itself be the subject of controversy. And although
it was not sufficient to turn the tide, during the vice-presidential debates of
that year, Lloyd Bentsen’s response to Dan Quayle became an overnight sen-
sation: “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was
a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” In a 1992 debate with
Bill Clinton, incumbent George H. W. Bush glanced at his watch for just a
brief moment, but that nonverbal gesture was so magnified (and later repeat-
edly replayed) by the television cameras that it instantly conveyed a sense of
impatience and disinterest that contributed to his eventual defeat. Al Gore’s
wooden performance and loud and frequent sighing in the year 2000 alienated
enough voters to make his race with George W. Bush close enough to lose,
while Barack Obama’s lackluster performance in the first debate of 2012 al-
most gave the election to Mitt Romney. Both 1996 and 2004 had incumbents
successfully facing off against candidates who were not in the least televisual,
Bob Dole and John Kerry, respectively, while in 2008 John McCain’s debate
demeanor came across as irritable, and disrespectful to Obama.
During the 1984 Democratic primary debates, Walter Mondale borrowed
an advertising slogan from the Wendy’s fast food franchise to counter the
“New Ideas” slogan of rival Gary Hart: “Where’s the beef?” It was hailed as
a clever tactic, and no amount of thick position and policy papers that Hart
presented to the news media could counter it. During the 2012 Republican
primaries, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain achieved widespread
recognition and a brief stint as frontrunner on the strength of his 9-9-9 tax
plan; his repeated uttering of the phrase “9-9-9” in primary debates was recog-
nized by many as another great advertising slogan. While there is nothing new
about political advertising, and political commercials are as old as commercial
television itself, it was media producer and McLuhan associate Tony Schwartz
who demonstrated the true power of the television commercial with his 1964
spot for Lyndon Johnson, known as the Daisy commercial. Rivaling the Daisy
commercial in impact and notoriety was the 1988 Willie Horton ad, run by
an independent political action committee in support of George H. W. Bush.

(Both of these ads, along with many other political commercials, can be found
on YouTube.) In 2004, another political action committee, Swift Boat Veter-
ans for Truth, ran attack ads against Democratic presidential candidate John
Kerry, undermining his credibility as a Vietnam War veteran, and giving rise
to a new term to refer to unfair and inaccurate attack ads: swiftboating. While
television remains the most powerful medium for reaching the widest number
of voters, and cable offers expanded options for targeting select audiences, the
Internet provides an additional means of distributing political commercials
of no small significance. The independently produced YouTube music video
of 2007, “I Got a Crush on Obama,” proved that a political campaign ad on
the Internet could go viral and provide a welcome boost to a presidential
candidate (Levinson, 2013). As much as it helped to solidify Obama’s image
as hip and cool, the sexy song and dance by the “Obama girl” turned political
discourse into a form of burlesque. Another pro-Obama video on YouTube
consisted of a mash-up of Apple’s famous 1984 ad introducing the Macin-
tosh, substituting Hillary Clinton for Big Brother. By way of response during
the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign uploaded to YouTube
a parody of the final episode of The Sopranos, featuring her and Bill Clinton
at a diner, with one of the actors from the HBO series appearing in the back-
ground, leading up to the introduction of her campaign’s new official song
(Celine Dion’s “You and I”).
Negative political advertising contributes to the decline of civility in our
culture (see Deborah Tannen’s insightful discussion in The Argument Culture,
1998), but even when the ads are positive in orientation, they rely on per-
suasive techniques and manipulation to achieve their goals. Candidates who
refrain from the use of political commercials see their standings in the polls
plummet as do those who choose not to respond to negative ads. And the
recent explosion of third-party advertising has only intensified the problem.
Commercials constitute another form of what Postman (1985) termed anti-
communication, designed not to open up discussion but close down argument,
appealing to the emotions rather than reason, providing simplistic slogans in
place of thoughtful explanation, and parables in place of exposition. In their
brevity and emphasis on images, while incorporating technopoly’s reliance
on technique in the service of efficiency, commercials are arguably the purest
expression of the television medium. Postman devoted much of his analysis of
television’s impact on political campaigning in Amusing Ourselves to Death to
the use of television commercials, and suggested that banning them might be
one small step we could take to restore a measure of seriousness to the political
process. Unfortunately, with the increasing appearance of third-party political
advertising and the expanded platforms of cable and the Internet, this no lon-
ger seems to be even a remote possibility.
Richard Nixon was the first to let advertising professionals control his
campaign in 1968, having learned his lesson concerning the power of televi-
sion in his loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960. As something of an expert on the
subject, several years after resigning following the Watergate scandal, he ad-
vised Senator Ted Kennedy to lose 20 pounds if he wanted to run for president,
a fact that Postman (1985) wryly comments on: “Although the Constitution
makes no mention of it, it would appear that fat people are now effectively
excluded from running for high political office” (p. 4). Broadcasters say that
the camera adds 10 pounds, which perhaps explains why comedians and talk
show hosts saw fit to comment on Bill Clinton’s weight during the 1992 pres-
idential campaign. More recently, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has
emerged as a potential future Republican presidential candidate, his greatest
challenge being not that he is more moderate than the majority of his party,
but that he is obese. That he is serious in his ambition was demonstrated when
he underwent gastric lap-band surgery in early 2013. We are certainly a far cry
from the days of William Taft, or for that matter, Dwight Eisenhower, our last
bald president. John F. Kennedy established good hair as an important sign of
political viability, which may well have doomed Joe Biden’s run for the Dem-
ocratic presidential nomination in 1988. By 2008, when he ran again during
the primaries, and eventually was chosen to be Obama’s running mate, the
magic of hair transplantation had done its job.
Politics may not be entirely reducible to cosmetics, but looks coupled with
personality are fundamental to image politics. According to McLuhan, the
kind of image that works best on television is a cool one, not sharp or well
defined, but rather one that invites participation on the part of the audience,
a process that involves projection and identification. Bill Clinton was the
epitome of coolness, appearing on the Arsenio Hall Show as a candidate in
1992, wearing shades and playing saxophone on “Heartbreak Hotel,” a song
recorded by Elvis Presley early in his career. As president, he participated in
a town hall on MTV and answered a question as to whether he wears boxers
or briefs; “usually briefs,” he answered. Whereas Clinton was known for going
on too long in his public speaking, what came across most markedly was his
ability to express empathy on camera. Like Reagan, Clinton excelled at con-
veying emotion to his audience, making reasoned argument all but irrelevant.
His successor, George W. Bush, was anything but eloquent, and in fact was
often mocked for his malapropisms, which became known as Bushisms. But
this failed to make a dent in the face of his ability to project a good natured,
down-home appeal, one that positioned him as part of the common folk and
worked well with the anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism of American cul-
ture. In other words, his nonverbal communication more than made up for his
lack of verbal facility. Obama embodied his own form of coolness that gen-
erated enormous enthusiasm during the 2008 election, and it is worth noting
the enormous progress this represents in that a majority of voters could find
an African American image one that they could relate to, identify with, and
ultimately accept as president. But Obama’s victory was still a victory of image
over substance, which arguably accounts for the reduced enthusiasm for his
reelection in 2012, albeit not reduced enough to lose the election.
Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death at a time when an actor,
Ronald Reagan, had become president, a development that was previously
inconceivable to many Americans, and made all the more disturbing by the
fact that polls showed that the majority of his supporters did not agree with his
political views, but voted for him in 1980 and re-elected him in 1984 because
they liked and trusted him as a person (or more accurately, the way in which
he played his role on television). Following Reagan’s lead, Fred Grandy, a star
of the television series The Love Boat, was elected to the US House of Rep-
resentatives in 1986, serving until 1994. Pop singer Sonny Bono was elected
to the United States House of Representatives in 1994 and served until his
death in 1998. More recently, we have seen film star Arnold Schwarzeneg-
ger follow in Reagan’s footsteps as governor of California from 2003 to 2011,
while former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura, who also had a brief career
as a Hollywood action adventure hero, was elected governor of Minnesota in
1998, serving one term ending in 2003. At present, film and television actor
Fred Thompson has been serving as US senator from Tennessee since 1994,
and comedian Al Franken has been the US senator from Minnesota since
2009. To be clear, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with an entertainer pur-
suing a career in politics, but such a move was once considered inconceivable
because there was a clear separation between politics and entertainment in
the public mind. And certainly less pernicious than the fact that a number of
entertainers have run for political office (and many more have been consid-
ered and decided against it; for example, actress Ashley Judd seriously con-
templated a run for a Kentucky senate seat in 2012) is the fact that politicians
as a class have come to see themselves as entertainers and celebrities.
At one time, appearing on an entertainment program was considered be-

neath the dignity of a serious politician. By the time that Postman was writing
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), it had become commonplace. As one of his
graduate students at the time, I remember him enlisting a group of students and
colleagues, asking us to think of every time that a politician had appeared on
an entertainment program on television. The result was the following passage:
It is difficult to say exactly when politicians began to put themselves forward, inten-
tionally, as sources of amusement. In the 1950’s, Senator Everett Dirksen appeared as a
guest on “What’s My Line?” When he was running for office, John F. Kennedy allowed
the television cameras of Ed Murrow’s “Person to Person” to invade his home. When
he was not running for office, Richard Nixon appeared for a few seconds on “Laugh-
In,” an hour-long comedy show based on the format of a television commercial. By the
1970’s, the public had started to become accustomed to the notion that political figures
were to be taken as part of the world of show business. In the 1980’s came the deluge.
Vice-presidential candidate William Miller did a commercial for American Express. So
did the star of the Watergate Hearings, Senator Sam Ervin. Former President Gerald
Ford joined with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for brief roles on “Dynasty.”
Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis appeared on “St. Elsewhere.” Speaker of the
House Tip O’Neill did a stint on “Cheers.” Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, George
McGovern, and Mayor Edward Koch hosted “Saturday Night Live.” Koch also played
the role of a fight manager in a made-for-television movie starring James Cagney. Mrs.
Nancy Reagan appeared on “Diff’rent Strokes.” (1985, p. 132)
I call your attention to this passage simply for what now seems the quaint
sense in which this handful of appearances constituted a deluge circa 1985.
Today, a list of such appearances would take up much more than a single
paragraph; indeed, it would be enough to fill an entire book. And to give one
example that perhaps sums up the current state of our presidential politics:
On September 5th, 2008, former US senator and actor Fred Thompson went
on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to declare his candidacy for the presidency,
not the first candidate to go that route, but he did this instead of participating
in a Republican primary debate that was being held at the exact same time
as the talk show. As a veteran of the big and small screen, Thompson knew
that a late night entertainment program hosted by a comedian would provide
him with a much better platform for launching his campaign than discussing
issues with other politicians. And indeed, who can blame him, as it would be
hard to tell the difference between the two forms of television programming?
On television, everything that anyone does is a performance, whether it
involves playing a role or playing yourself, and indeed the distinction between
the two is often not clear. This means that all types of television appearances are
interchangeable—running for political office, appearing as a pundit of a news

program, becoming the host of a talk show, or acting in a television drama.
As Boorstin (1978) observed, a culture dominated by the image is a culture
dominated by celebrities, individuals well known for being famous. This also
introduces new problems in image management, as the personal lives of celeb-
rities become content for the entertainment media. Politicians can no longer
hide their health or family problems from citizens, perhaps the most extreme in-
stance being the impeachment of Bill Clinton over lying about an extramarital
affair. Meyrowitz (1985) has argued that the electronic media environment has
made it impossible for any public official to be seen as a great leader anymore.
We simply know too much about them, about what they eat for breakfast, what
kind of underwear they wear, about youthful drug and alcohol use, high school
bullying, or any other misconduct, be it personal or professional. While in one
sense this can be viewed as guaranteeing a more democratic political system, it
also means that the qualities that are associated with leadership are no longer
enough to qualify individuals for leadership positions, as they are overshadowed
by personal characteristics that may be irrelevant to the job at hand. For exam-
ple, the resignation of General David Petraeus from his position as director of
the CIA in 2012 over the revelation of an extramarital affair was seen by many
as a loss, given his effectiveness as a military and civilian leader.
In a celebrity culture, it is not the distant figure of authority that becomes
the focus of attention, but the intimate close-up of the celebrity. Reagan under-
stood very well that when speaking in public, his real audience was the televi-
sion camera. While he was called the Great Communicator, he was not a gifted
public speaker, but that didn’t matter, because he knew that the live audience
was nothing more than a prop and that what he needed to do was look into the
camera and speak in a conversational tone that played well in the living rooms
and bedrooms of the television audience. By way of contrast, in 2004, after a
disappointing third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses in the race for the Dem-
ocratic presidential nomination, Howard Dean did what would otherwise be
considered the best thing a candidate could do under the circumstances: he de-
livered a rousing speech to rally his supporters and campaign workers, raise their
morale, and motivate them for the work that needed to be done for the New
Hampshire primary. According to the requirements of traditional conventional
public speaking, he did everything right in his address. But it was televised, and
on television he looked like a madman, and his address was dubbed the “I Have
a Scream” speech. Prior to that moment, he had been considered a serious chal-
lenger for the nomination; following it, he was never again a contender.
No political movement can go very far without endorsements by entertain-

ers, and a celebrity politician to serve as the face of the group. A good case in
point is the contrast between the Tea Party and the Occupy movements. The
Tea Party has received a great deal of attention on television news programs due
to the presence of leaders such as Sarah Palin, the beauty queen turned Alaska
governor chosen as John McCain’s running mate in 2008. Although interviews
quickly revealed that she was extremely unprepared to be vice-president, it was
clear that she was chosen to provide the image of a woman on the presidential
ticket in order to counter Obama’s image as an African American. Despite Pal-
in’s poor showing as a candidate, she has done well for herself on the celebrity
route, and helped to promote the Tea Party, as has Republican primary candi-
date Michele Bachmann and, early on, the idiosyncratic Republican maverick,
Ron Paul. The Occupy movement, on the other hand, had a great deal of diffi-
culty getting television coverage simply because long shots of crowds of people
and tents on Wall Street in lower Manhattan and elsewhere in the country are
just not very compelling on television, at least not for very long. The move-
ment’s leadership, following a leftist ideology, did not want to emphasize indi-
viduals over the group, leaving them without the kind of personification that
the television medium requires. The irony is that they did not realize that the
ideology they were opposed to, individualism, had already become obsolete in
the age of television, replaced by a very different sense of personification and
personalization—not the individual isolated from the group, but the group in
personified form via the celebrity image. Indeed, ideology itself, a product of
the print media environment, when it was possible to publish detailed political
platforms and manifestos, has also become obsolete.
Terence P. Moran (1984) has argued that image politics had superseded
earlier forms of issue and party politics. Issues are not entirely irrelevant, but
few take the time to pore over published materials to understand their com-
plexities. Instead, they are reduced most often to technical criteria: Whose
plan is most effective in improving the economy, creating more and better
jobs, providing the best possible healthcare, making citizens as safe as possible?
And absent any clear indicators, we are left with the image of issues, rather
than the issues themselves. Political parties once served as the main medium
through which candidates connected to voters, but the primary system wiped
out the role of party bosses in selecting candidates who, as political celebrities,
become much bigger than the parties themselves. Both issues and parties be-
come a matter of demographics and psychographics, about allegiances based
on lifestyle and geography, and this in turn informs the image strategy that
candidates follow. Here we can see the triumph of the technological imper-
ative, as polls and surveys influence what candidates do and say, resulting in
the disappearance of leadership as a quality in American politics. Research
techniques have become so adept at predicting voter behavior that campaigns
no longer concern themselves with trying to sway the minds, or even the
hearts, of the few undecided voters that have actually been identified, but
instead concern themselves primarily with voter turnout. Whoever gets more
of their supporters to their polls wins, a triumph for the efficiency of numbers
over the reasoning power of the word. Ellul (1964, 1965) argues that the tech-
nological criterion of efficiency places all significant decisions in the hands
of technical experts, specialists in various aspects of the economy, finance,
business, foreign relations, the military, energy, the environment, education,
social welfare, etc. Candidates are relegated to specialists in getting elected,
and once elected they continue to take part in a permanent campaign, manip-
ulating public opinion to support the decisions made by technical experts; for
Ellul, this political illusion is not about power or ideology, but the simple fact
that our technological societies are so complex that ordinary people no longer
know enough to decide on most policy questions, and therefore have to be
guided to support whatever is considered the most efficient path. Once more,
it is not Orwell’s 1984, but Huxley’s Brave New World at work here.
Some hold out hope that the Internet, the web, social media, and mobile
devices, can act as a counterbalance to this tendency. Certainly, it has made a
difference in political campaigning. In 1992, then former California Governor
Jerry Brown (who has since returned to that office) was ahead of the curve in
announcing a toll-free 800 number for campaign donations for his run in the
Democratic primary. And although Al Gore genuinely did shape policy regard-
ing online communication as senator and vice-president, it was Howard Dean
who benefited from the support of bloggers in 2004, but the positive reception
gained via electronic text evaporated due to his inability to handle the televi-
sion image. YouTube was a factor in the 2008 election, but more importantly,
Obama demonstrated the power of the Internet in organizing supporters and
campaign workers for grass roots mobilization. In the Democratic primaries, this
took Hillary Clinton, who concentrated mainly on television advertising, by
surprise and proved effective as well in the general campaign. But is this a true
restoration of some semblance of traditional democratic political discourse or
simply a further application of technique? And to what extent does audiovisual
content overshadow typographic discourse as bandwidth continues to expand?
The Internet was also very much a part of the Occupy movement, and various
revolutions, successful and failed, such as the Arab Spring. There are reasons for
cautious optimism in the improved accessibility of information online, in the
political discussion going on in the blogosphere, in the ability of the Internet to
aid in generating awareness and organizing groups of people for political action.
If nothing else, the new media’s potential for disruption is clear. But the new
media are still just elaborations of the electronic media; their biases are quite
different from those of the print media, and we well may ask whether we, as
citizens, have voted ourselves off of the island.
·7·
neon gods
“The Sound of Silence,” a song written by Paul Simon and originally recorded
by Simon and Garfunkel, places the Judeo-Christian religious tradition in a
contemporary context, updating the biblical polemic against idolatry and the
Second Commandment’s prohibition against graven images with a descrip-
tion of a crowd bowing and praying to a neon god of their own creation. The
choice of neon as the modern equivalent of the golden calf is of no small sig-
nificance. As early as 1920, neon lights were used for signage, notably to help
advertise the presence of stores, theaters, restaurants, bars, and the like. Their
association, therefore, is with commerce and consumerism, and in particular
with amusements. Dazzling, colorful, often quite gaudy, neon signs were most
intense in locales such as New York City’s Times Square and Broadway, one of
the primary centers of American entertainment, along with Hollywood, and
Las Vegas, the city that Postman identified as the locale most representative
of America in the television age, being devoted entirely to entertainment.
Lighting up the night so as to obscure the heavens, these powerful electric
lights serve as an apt symbol for the problematic nature of religious experience
in the age of electronic media.
Although “The Sound of Silence” conveys a genuine sense of spirituality,
as a musical recording, it isolates the song from the singers, the performance
from the performers, the communication from its concrete human context. It
therefore presents us with music not as a shared experience that we all partic-
ipate in creating, but one in which we become passive consumers, collectors
whose most creative act is to produce playlists. Robert Albrecht, one of Post-
man’s students, discusses the tragic loss of communal, participatory musical
experience quite insightfully in his book, Mediating the Muse (2004). That loss
also has profound implications for contemporary religious experience insofar as
religious ritual involves communing with other human beings, as well as with
some conception of the divine. As Walter Ong (1967, 1982) explains, sound
is intimately connected to a sense of the sacred. The human voice, the most
distinctive and unique physical element of the human person, is produced by
breath, which is closely associated with life itself. In Hebrew the words for
breath and wind are synonymous with spirit and soul, both human and divine.
It is worth asking, therefore, if it makes a difference whether the voices heard
in song and prayer at a religious service are prerecorded and/or broadcast rather
than live? For that matter, does it make a difference if the sound of a bugle
playing “Taps” at a military funeral is prerecorded, as now happens sometimes
due to a shortage of military personnel who can actually play the instrument?
Does the decontextualization of sound, its removal from a specific situation
grounded in a particular time and place, the loss of what Benjamin (1968)
would term its aura, amount to a devaluation of ritual? A desacralization? Per-
haps even a desecration? The problem, as always, is one of context. Participat-
ing in a religious ritual places us in a special context that is different from all
other contexts, situating us in a distinct semantic environment, one that asks
us to play different roles and play by a different set of rules. Whether the loca-
tion is a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque, or outdoors, at home, or in a
rented hall, religious experience, as Eliade (1959) explains, is characterized by
a sense of sacred space and sacred time, as separate and distinct from profane
space and time. Indeed, the deep meaning of sanctification and consecration,
traced back to the Hebrew word kadosh, is to set apart and differentiate.
What happens, then, when religion is moved out of its particular context
of the sacred, away from contexts that have been carefully chosen and prepared
to communicate the seriousness of religious ritual and create a sense of separa-
tion from the everyday, profane world? What happens when religion is framed
within a new context created by the electronic media? As Postman (1985)
notes, on television religious programming may be interrupted for commercial
advertisements, may be preceded and followed by profane programming, and
may be otherwise juxtaposed with other types of programs as the viewer moves
neon gods 115
back and forth among the many channel offerings. Similarly, the religious web-
site may be one of several pages or tabs opened at the same time, so other
programs may be running as well, not to mention the presence of background
images and screen savers. Moreover, incoming email, instant messages, text
messages, voice messages, and cell phone calls may interrupt the experience
at any moment. Moving outside of the screen to consider the conditions of
attendance, the larger context is not a sacred space especially devoted to and
designed for religious experience, but a profane environment that may contain
many distractions and imposes few special restrictions on behavior. Simply put,
the strict separation between the sacred and the profane that can be achieved
in real physical situations cannot be duplicated through the electronic me-
dia, hence Postman’s criticism that television, and by extension the Internet,
trivializes religious experience. And with the advent of mobile devices, even
established sacred spaces can be invaded and disrupted, as congregants receive
telephone calls and text messages, or check their email; some religious leaders,
in an attempt to adapt to the new media environment, have encouraged wor-
shippers to tweet and post updates during services, further blurring the bound-
aries between the sacred and the profane. I should also note that during Neil
Postman’s funeral in 2003, as the rabbi was delivering his eulogy, someone’s cell
phone rang, playing an electronic version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
The irony did not escape those of us who were gathered there that day (the fact
that Postman was a baseball fan conferred additional significance on the event,
but personally I was mortified as it was the same ring tone that I had set my own
phone to, a fact that others were aware of).
To be sure, for the infirm, the ailing, and the aged, the ability to experi-
ence a religious ritual via broadcast or streamed over the Internet can be a
great blessing, a way to maintain a sense of contact with your faith. But the
sense of sacred time is hard to create and maintain when religious experience
is contained within the frame of the screen, and sacred space becomes even
more problematic. Houses of worship are designed to communicate a sense
of spirituality, for example, through the use of high ceilings, elevated altars,
ritual objects, and religious icons. Acoustics are often a prime concern, to
facilitate prayer and song; again, sound is central to sense of the sacred. And
preachers need to be heard more than they need to be seen, as delivering ser-
mons is a time-honored form of public address. From antiquity into the mod-
ern era, sacred architecture has evolved to meet the spiritual needs of people
congregating together in a particular physical place, but what serves the needs
of presence and proximity translates poorly when decontextualized by the
camera, and recontextualized on the screen. Traditional religious ritual and

ceremony have much in common with public speaking, theater, and many
other forms of performance conducted before live, co-present audiences, all
of which run counter to the bias of the video medium, which favors images
that are up close and personal. A traditional religious service on the screen
does not have much more visual appeal than the proceedings of the House of
Representatives as broadcast on C-SPAN.
Unless there is some overriding interest in the proceedings, for example, for
a state funeral or royal wedding, content that runs counter to the bias of the me-
dium will not draw much of an audience. The alternative is to follow the bias of
the medium and create religious programming that is also good television; this
means that it will be attractive to viewers and, above all, entertaining, following
established formats such as the variety show and the talk show. This is pre-
cisely what the phenomenon known as televangelism represents, and Postman
wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) at a time when several televangelists
had suddenly gained national recognition. Many of the most popular televan-
gelists that he wrote about soon followed the typical celebrity pattern of a fall
from grace due to scandal, notably, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Jimmy
Swaggart, while others such as Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, and Pat Robertson
have generated a great deal of controversy through their involvement in social
issues and political campaigns. To date, televangelists have yet to recapture the
mainstream popularity they enjoyed in the 1980s, but to some extent this is also
due to the expansion of television channels through cable and satellite, not to
mention the advent of the Internet and web. The result has been less concentra-
tion on a handful of preachers, although a larger number of religious leaders now
appeal to regional audiences, and megachurches have rapidly proliferated in the
21st century, fueled by online communications, with attendance in the thou-
sands or even tens of thousands. In conjunction with this, the religious services
themselves become increasingly more tailored to the bias of television, not only
for broadcast and streaming, but also for local projection on jumbo screens for
the benefit of live audiences. And even when the setting and presentation are
unaltered, the mere presence of the camera instills a self-consciousness among
participants that would not otherwise be present, in religious ceremonies as it
does in the courtroom (Thaler, 1994, 1997).
Postman argues that the more religious broadcasters try to make their
programming appealing to audiences by going with television’s bias towards
entertainment, the more they lose the essential thrust of religion, which is
impose certain moral and ethical limits and demands on human behavior—to
neon gods 117
be a disciple is to embrace discipline. Certainly, preaching fire and brimstone

simply does not play well on television, and the “thou shalt nots” of scrip-
ture are too negative, and too abstract, to appeal to audiences. So instead we
get friendly, pleasant, and attractive faces, and positive messages that praise,
celebrate, and flatter the audience. One of the major functions of traditional
religion is to help us to deal with death, with our awareness of our own mor-
tality, but even more importantly, with the loss of loved ones, with grief and
mourning, and this is all but entirely absent from such programming. Even if
there were a way to provide comfort and caring through the television medi-
um, it would run counter to the medium’s bias towards entertaining content.
Postman was far from alone in criticizing the constant emphasis on financial
success and material prosperity in the messages of many televangelists, a great
reversal from the Protestant work ethic. Again, traditional religion asks for de-
ferred gratification and asserts that good acts are their own reward, and/or that
faith will be rewarded in the next world, messages that stand in contrast with
the instant gratification promised by television advertising rooted in a culture of
technopoly. And while preaching the American dream, televangelists have also
been criticized for living it in a manner unbecoming of traditional clergy and
placing extraordinary emphasis on collecting contributions and donations from
audience members. Of course, organized religions typically include appeals for
charity, and have long been open to periodic accusations about misuse of funds.
However, broadcasting is an expensive proposition, while reaching a mass au-
dience greatly increases the potential for fundraising on behalf of individuals
and organizations, as do more targeted campaigns conducted via narrowcasting,
websites, and social media. This is not to deny that the electronic media have
been a boon to legitimate charities and causes, only to note that the balance be-
tween rendering unto Caesar and rendering unto God that existed in the past,
mediated as it was by the local community, has been altered by the electronic
media, and not necessarily in God’s favor.
Indeed, God loses out on television, as the medium’s visual emphasis does
not sit well with an abstract conception of the divine, and its bias towards the
intimate runs counter to the very nature of the divine as something greater than
human and other than human. The focus thus shifts to the human figures in front
of the camera, notably the preacher or priest or clergy. As Postman explains,
on television, God is a vague and subordinate character. Though His name is invoked
repeatedly, the concreteness and persistence of the image of the preacher carries the
message that it is he, not He, who must be worshipped. I do not mean to imply that
the preacher wishes it to be so; only that the power of a close-up televised face, in
color, makes idolatry a continual hazard. Television is, after all, a form of graven
imagery far more alluring than a golden calf. (1985, pp. 122–123)
This also alters the nature of the preacher or clergy, changing a somewhat distant
authority figure to a celebrity that the audience experiences as a close friend, in
the form of parasocial relationships (Horton & Wohl, 1956). Encouraging the
illusion of intimacy also requires the transmission of positive messages, rather
than ones that make demands of the audience or provide much in the way
of direct comfort or counseling. Clergy become entertainers, congenial hosts,
and celebrities known not for their piety but for their personality and physical
appearance, and also (potentially) for the details of their private lives, their
lifestyle, and any controversies or scandals they might be associated with. Here
too, this is not to deny the long tradition of charismatic religious leaders, but the
very nature of charisma changes along with the means by which preachers are
known to their followers. And while, in filling the screen, they may leave little
room for God, the bias of the medium may also affect the ways in which the
divine is conceptualized. Alphabetic literacy is associated with the introduction
of monotheism and more generally with a transcendent notion of the divine, as
opposed to the immanent deities of polytheism and animism prevalent in an-
tiquity and prehistory. In the television age, we find, as Boorstin (1978) relates,
“Jesus, we are told from the pulpit, was ‘no sissy, but a regular fellow’” (p. 74),
or perhaps more fittingly, from the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim
Rice, a superstar. Whether turned into a celebrity or a superstar, a sense of the
sacred is lost in favor of the profane.
When abstract scripture and the vague, frozen imagery of religious ico-
nography give way to cinematic presentations featuring human actors, with
intimate close-ups of real faces and bodies, controversy seems all but inevi-
table as in films as diverse as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ
and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ. Conceptions of the divine that came
into being in a media environment dominated by alphabetic literacy and
further modified by typography are undermined by the concrete re-creation
of reality associated with the photographic image. The unique threat that
contemporary image culture poses to Christianity, and by extension to the
other Abrahamic religions, has been discussed by Ellul in The Humiliation of
the Word (1985), and more recently, by Arthur W. Hunt III in The Vanishing
Word (2003). Camille Paglia provides a somewhat different take in Sexual
Personae (1990) and Glittering Images (2012), albeit one that also points to the
challenges posed to mainstream religion.
neon gods 119
And apart from specific religious content, the motion picture gave us larger-
than-life human figures, hyperreal simulations whose performances when edit-
ed together, surpassed anything that could be accomplished in a live situation
(Benjamin, 1968). Transcending the limits of biology, immortal, and able to
return again and again in a new kind of sacred ritual, these actors came to be
known as stars, sources of light in their own right. (Note that in the ancient
and medieval world, stars were believed to be deities or spirits.) Their admirers
became known as fans, shortened from fanatics, and they congregated at motion
picture theaters that by the 1920s came to be referred to as cathedrals. With
the introduction of television, the screen shrank down, bringing these neon
gods into the home, making them less lofty perhaps, but far more numerous,
even more so as screens multiplied with the addition of home computers, lap-
tops, and mobile devices. In this sense, as the electronic media environment
has continued to evolve, this new kind of godhood or supernatural existence
has been increasingly extended to all of us, paralleling contemporary religious
beliefs that stress the self, as opposed to a concept of God as wholly other, what
Harold Bloom (1993) refers to as the American religion. McLuhan noted that the
electronic media allow us to be everywhere and nowhere at all at the same time,
a center without margins, characteristics that St. Augustine attributed to God
(McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988). And McLuhan associate Tony Schwartz (1983)
referred to the electronic media as the second god, explaining,
Ask someone raised in the religious traditions of the Western world to describe God,
and this, with idiosyncratic variations, might be the answer:
“God is all-knowing and all-powerful. He is a spirit, not a body, and He exists both
outside us and within us. God is always with us, because He is everywhere. We can
never fully understand Him, because He works in mysterious ways.”
In broad terms, this describes the God of our fathers, but it also describes the elec-
tronic media, the second god, which man has created. (p. 1)
The first electronic medium, the telegraph, was closely associated with the
rise of spiritualism as a belief system in the 19th century, the idea that the
spirits of the dead can communicate with the living through an individual
particularly attuned to the otherworldly plane of existence, that is, the other
sort of medium. Belief in telepathy, too, followed technologies such as the tele-
graph, telephone, and wireless communications, prompting Upton Sinclair
to write Mental Radio (1930). Radio also had an early association with faith
healing. There is a close connection between the electronic media and New
Age spirituality, and as the electronic media environment gives rise to forms
of neo-tribalism, it follows that forms of religion associated with tribal societ-
ies, such as polytheism and animism, have been retrieved, albeit in new forms.
New Age spirituality represents an eclectic approach to religious experience:
the individual is able to pick and choose, mix and match, among a variety
of western and non-western approaches to the sacred and the supernatural,
including various forms of mysticism and neo-paganism. This also represents
a return to the spirituality characteristic of oral culture, which Goody (1986)
describes as one of seeking, rather than fixed doctrine. Writing and literacy
introduced a measure of coherence to religious experience through the intro-
duction of the sacred text, which also had the effect of creating boundaries
between believers and nonbelievers (based on acceptance or rejection of the
sacred text), and therefore forming concepts such as conversion, heresy, and
apostasy. As the abstract thinking associated with literacy made possible more
abstract and transcendent conceptions of the divine, such as the monothe-
ism of the Abrahamic religions, and it also allowed for a shift in focus from
outward behavior to inward belief. But writing also opened the door to the
development of sophisticated moral and ethical systems and the evolution of
codified law, which introduced new notions of justice and equality. Moreover,
the rigidity of the fixed text was mitigated by the need for interpretation, re-
quiring some degree of balance between the oral and the literate.
Whether viewed as a curse or a blessing, or in neutral terms, writing facil-
itated the establishment of organized religion as we have come to understand
it, and literacy made possible the introduction of universal religions not tied
to any one tribe or nation. In the age of television, we have seen the decline
of organized religion, and this is surely associated with postliterate culture’s
devaluation of sacred texts and, indeed, texts of any kind. This is not to deny
that new media have in some ways extended the effects of typography in mak-
ing sacred literature easily available online. As previously noted, however,
they do so in a context in which it is difficult to separate the sacred from
the profane. Moreover, it is important to acknowledge Postman’s Huxleyan
warning that the availability of scripture is not terribly meaningful if no one
actually reads it. Given a choice between struggling with a difficult text or
watching an entertaining video, it is difficult for the text to compete.
Within mainstream religious institutions, the Internet “is being used
to strengthen the faith, spiritual growth, and the faith of the members; to
evangelize and perform missions in communities around the world; and
to perform a variety of pious and practical everyday activities,” according to
neon gods 121
Cheryl Anne Casey (2001, p. 36), one of Postman’s students, and she goes on
to note that “one of the prime benefits seen to derive from seeking religion
on the Internet is the freedom from church dogma and hierarchy, allowing for
open discussions on matters of faith” (p. 37). But the democratizing of religion
also reflects a loss of coherence, a devaluing of the special role of clergy as in-
terpreters of sacred texts, and of the texts themselves. Official doctrine gives
way to a multiplicity of expressed opinions, and the destruction of the monop-
oly of knowledge held by religious leaders and organizations results in a loss of
hierarchical control. This may appear to be a positive development to many
people, but as with all change, it has its benefits and its costs. It is worthwhile
to recall that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that led to the overthrow of the
Shah and the establishment of a theocracy began with cassette tape record-
ings of the Ayatollah Khomeini smuggled into the country, and that Osama
bin Laden built a terrorist network through the use of email, websites, videos,
cell phones, and social media. Whether they are rooted in Islam, Christianity,
or any other belief system, new media have empowered fringe sects and cults
with violent agendas, allowing small groups of extremists to organize over dis-
tance, further enabling the kind of terrorist activity that has marred the late
20th and early 21st century.
The rise of fundamentalism more generally, across many different religious
traditions, may be a reaction against modernity, but it is also a product of the
electronic media environment and therefore is a phenomenon distinct from
older forms of zealotry. In the age of typography, religion tended to become
compartmentalized as a sector of society separate and independent from other
sectors such as government, business, the military, etc. One of the characteris-
tics of electronic media is their blurring of the boundaries, whether it is between
genres of entertainment, fact and fiction, public and private sectors, childhood
and adulthood, or other roles and contexts. The blurring of the sacred and pro-
fane is consistent with these other effects, and this can be seen in any number
of ways, including the desire of fundamentalists to extend religion into every
aspect of human activity. Also, in traditional communities, there is always some
pressure to conform, and it is also true that individuals with different points of
view, interests, and motivations have to find a way to negotiate with each oth-
er, accommodate one another, in order to live together, the alternative being
to leave and join or create another local community. The electronic media’s
ability to tie like-minded individuals together at a distance, makes it possible for
extremists to create a large-scale movement. Moreover, although fundamental-
ism was based on the literal interpretations of sacred texts during the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, today it is better understood as a product of the elec-
tronic transmission of audiovisual messages featuring televisual religious leaders.
In the United States and elsewhere, we are witness to two forms of extrem-
ism, a social and cultural split between religious fundamentalism on the one
hand and an aggressive form of atheism on the other. This bifurcation parallels
the two polarities of the electronic media environment, fundamentalism reflect-
ing the photographic tendency towards the irrational, and atheism mirroring
the telegraphic and technopolistic impulse towards the hyperrational. Extreme
atheism, in denying all possibility of the sacred and the transcendent, reduc-
es human existence to the scientific emphasis on method, on means, on the
question of how rather than why, leaving us with little else to turn to but the
technological imperative. Again, the problem is a loss of balance. As we look
back to the age of typography and the Enlightenment values it gave rise to, we
find a balance between faith and reason, as we do between the image and the
word, and between the drive towards technocracy and the braking power of tra-
ditional culture and social institutions. For those who hold to either extreme, as
for those who follow the eclectic path of the seeker and those who simply ignore
such questions altogether as irrelevant to life and career, the result is the same:
The loss of overall cultural coherence. And it is not entirely clear whether our
culture can survive absent some measure of coherence. In The End of Education
(1995), Postman argues that schools, which are charged with the transmission
of our cultural heritage to future generations, must have one or more gods to
serve in order to function effectively. As he explains
With some reservations but mostly with conviction, I use the word narrative as a syn-
onym for god, with a small g. I know it is risky to do so, not only because the word god,
having an aura of sacredness, is not to be used lightly, but also because it calls to mind
a fixed figure or image. But it is the purpose of such figures or images to direct one’s
mind to an idea and, more to my point, to a story—not any kind of story, but one that
tells of origins and envisions a future, a story that constructs ideals, prescribes rules
of conduct, provides a source of authority, and, above all, gives a sense of continuity
and purpose. A god, in the sense I am using the word, is the name of a great narrative,
one that has sufficient credibility, complexity, and symbolic power to enable one to
organize one’s life around it. (pp. 5–6)
Among the gods that have failed to provide a unifying and inspiring narrative
in contemporary culture, Postman includes traditional religion, Enlighten-
ment rationalism, communism, fascism, Nazism, liberal democracy, economic
utility, consumerism, science, technology, and multiculturalism. And while
Postman here invokes the concept of deity in a metaphorical sense, it serves
neon gods 123
to underline the important contributions that religion has played in creating

cultural coherence and continuity, and in helping us to understand what it
means to be human, and how to remain human in a technological age.
I began this chapter with a reference to “The Sound of Silence,” a song that
criticizes the silence that results from a lack of the moral courage required to speak
out in the face of wrongdoing, reflecting both the Holocaust and the civil rights
and antiwar movements of the sixties. In some ways, as Perkinson (1991) argued,
the electronic media have made it much harder to remain silent and unaware of
injustice in the world, and there is no doubt that without awareness there can be
no action. Whether awareness is sufficient to generate needed action, there is no
denying the argument that the electronic media, in connecting us to people and
places all over the world, and in presenting them to us in intimate, audiovisual
fashion, have enhanced our moral and ethical sensitivities. But “The Sound of
Silence” does not uniformly condemn silence; it also incorporates the sense of
silence as respectful, reflective, and sacred. As much as our experience of the sa-
cred is strongly associated with voice and sound, it also is connected to the “still
small voice” of God speaking to Elijah in the Bible (1 Kings 19:12), with quiet,
and with silence. Many religions incorporate some form of silent prayer in their
worship services, and silence is integral to contemplation and meditation. During
the 20th century, and especially in the aftermath of the Second World War, there
was quite a bit of discussion of what was referred to as God’s silence, and Ong
(1967) suggested that it may be not so much that God has stopped speaking to us
as it is that our electronic media generate so much noise that we have drowned
out that still small voice. Whether religious experience is conceived of as com-
munion with something greater than ourselves, whether it is a personal deity or a
transcendent understanding of the universe, or whether it is a matter of an inner
journey, a soul-searching, or simply an effort to better understand our own minds
and consciousness, the loss of silence and the constant deluge of distractions can
be nothing short of devastating to our collective spiritual health, as well as our
prospects for cultural survival.
·8·
grand theft education
No stranger to educational technology, Postman “taught” a class on media

ecology for the CBS television series, Sunrise Semester, which broadcast col-
lege-level courses. In Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), Postman re-
lates that the course he taught from 1976 to 1977 was seen by approximately
2,000,000 viewers in over 60 different cities, and as he described it:
Sunrise Semester is, to say the least, not a fast-paced, visually dynamic television pro-
gram. … It features what TV directors disdainfully call a “talking head,” that is, a
professor who is more or less immobile, viewed from no more than two perspectives.
The cameras do not move, and there is a minimum of visual distraction from the
ideational content of the professor’s course. This is television used to replicate the
lecture platform: all exposition and no drama. That is why Sunrise Semester is shown
at six o’clock in the morning. (p. 191)
Postman goes on to explain that he received 1,500 letters in response to his

“class” and of those,
less than fifty had anything to do with academic content, and among those many
merely requested that I repeat the name of a book or author I had mentioned, or
spell the name of some concept I had discussed. … The bulk of the letters addressed
themselves to what I was wearing, what relative or actor I looked like, my need for a
haircut, my mannerisms, my friendliness or aloofness, my moods, etc. I do not report

this to deprecate my “fans,” but to make the point that they are fans, or at least an
audience witnessing TV performances. They are not “students,” a fact which they
well understood. Talking head or not, a moving image had come into their homes,
and their response was as to a drama. But since there was no drama, their attention
was on our relationship and on their feelings about that relationship, which is how
fans are supposed to respond. (p. 191)
In reporting on this experience, Postman was not denying that television is

educational, just that it has a curriculum and agenda of its own, one that
runs counter to the curriculum of traditional schooling, a curriculum with-
out prerequisites, perplexity, or exposition (Postman, 1985). In this sense, all
television programming is educational, whether it is intended to be or not,
and television that is specifically designated as educational teaches something
other than what it claims to be teaching. For example, Postman (1979) was
critical of the highly acclaimed PBS program Sesame Street, because it utilized
quick cuts, flashy visuals, and the format of television commercials to teach
preschoolers the letters of the alphabet and numbers, arguing that what it was
teaching was how to watch television. One time when Postman was visiting a
graduate class I was teaching, at a time when my son had just started elemen-
tary school, I decided to play devil’s advocate, and explained that my son had
been watching Sesame Street, and the program was helping him to learn his
ABCs. Postman responded by pointing out that there are only 26 letters in the
alphabet, and children had been learning them without too much trouble for
centuries before television. As it turns out, in 2002 Sesame Street changed its
format to one that was more structured, linear, and narrative-oriented, albeit
with no concession regarding Postman’s criticisms. And while the changes
may be considered a step in the right direction, the fact remains that, regard-
less of the content, the medium’s emphasis on the visual and the immediate
works against the inherent biases of typography, teaching lessons that under-
mine the intent of the programming.
We might well ask whether children are better off now that there are
cable channels specializing in children’s programming running 24/7/365, not
to mention video recordings that can be viewed via television, computer, and
mobile devices. And we certainly ought to question whether it is in the best
interest of very young children to spend time watching programs such as Tele-
tubbies, Boobah, and YoGabbaGabba. From Postman’s perspective, the worst
offenders are programs that are identified as educational, because they mislead
us about the value of the programming. At least no one mistakes a program
grand theft education 127
like SpongeBob SquarePants for being anything other than an amusement.

Television’s trivialization of education is not a problem for children alone,
however, as is implied by the recent popularity of the term edutainment, fit-
tingly enough introduced by Walt Disney. For example, cable television has
given us specialized educational programming via the National Geographic
Channel, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel, and while this
has provided an avenue for the dissemination of documentaries, audiences are
especially drawn to programs such as Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan, Moon-
shiners, Ancient Aliens, UFO Files, and The Nostradamus Effect. On the An-
imal Planet channel, two specials entitled Mermaids: The Body Found and
Mermaids: The New Evidence, broadcast in 2012 and 2013, respectively, gave
the cable outlet its highest ratings in its seventeen-year history. These fake
documentaries were assumed to be real by many viewers, prompting the Na-
tional Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to issue a statement stating
that mermaids do not actually exist. And it is almost too easy to mention that
The Learning Channel, aka TLC, has achieved its highest ratings by turning
to reality programs, such as Toddlers & Tiaras, and its notorious spin-off, Here
Comes Honey Boo Boo.
Proponents of new media, while generally agreeing with the critique
of television, argue that computer technology is different, one of the dif-
ferences being that computers are a medium for writing and therefore re-
inforce at least some of the biases of print media. But there is a difference
between the deep reading associated with typography and the surface-level
skipping around that tends to characterize online reading, which, in turn,
encourages the kind of abbreviated, telegraphic discourse associated with
Twitter and Facebook status updates. As Carr (2010) argues, Google tends
to narrow rather than expand the thought process, and email, social media,
and hyperlinks alike give way to a barrage of interruptions, and the inability
to follow a sustained argument. Although there have been commendable
attempts at turning hypertext into a literary form, the result tends to be an
undermining of linear thought, logic, and narrative alike. Lev Manovich
(2001) argues that new media substitute the logic of the database, random
access with no set or order or organization, for the long tradition of narrative
sequence. Even as simple a form of software as word processing changes the
way that we write, short circuiting the thought processes that precede actual
composition, known as pre-composition. During the mid-nineties, I attend-
ed a conference with Postman during which a school superintendent from
Brooklyn gave a keynote address explaining how the introduction of personal
computers into the classroom was helping to teach elementary school stu-
dents how to write. He explained that the advantage of word processing
is that the students could write something, and if they did not like what
they had written, they could edit it, or delete it and start over. During the
question-and-answer session that followed, Postman asked: “Why couldn’t
the students do the same thing with a pencil and paper?” And perhaps there
was something they could do with the computer that they could not do with
pencil and paper. But the school superintendent could not answer Postman’s
question. And if nothing else, are we not entitled to an answer?
Moreover, although computer programming is based on artificial “lan-
guages” which certainly depend on alphanumeric coding and logical opera-
tions and therefore require a certain type of literacy, it is very much a form of
craft literacy, not a social literacy. There are no literary works nor any signif-
icant cultural documents written in C++, Java, or Python, and neither does
any dialogue or discussion take place in those languages. To the extent that
they may be considered languages at all, they represent the extreme technol-
ogizing of the word (Ong, 1982) and a shift from word to number, as they
represent the binary code of computing. As such, they are part of the assault
on the word from the extreme of hyperrationality associated with speed and
efficiency. It is not surprising, therefore, that this sort of computer literacy
tends to be limited to technical experts, so that even while most users gain
more active control over older forms of communication such as publication
and broadcasting (e.g., via podcasting and YouTube), they remain passive us-
ers of the software supplied to them (Rushkoff, 2011). At the other end, the
interface that users encounter has shifted over the years to increasingly less
alphanumeric forms, whether it is the mouse and icons of the graphical user
interface, or voice recognition and voice synthesis systems such as Siri for
the iPhone, or even the nascent virtual reality interfaces of the Wii, Kinect,
Playstation Move, and the like. Such interfaces reflect the assault on the word
from the other extreme associated with the image and hyperreality. And as
Paul Lippert (2000, 2003) argues, the two extremes also represent an unrec-
ognized form of digital divide.
New media reflect the same biases towards telegraphic discourse and
image-based communication as television, but replace the passivity of the
viewer with various forms of active engagement on the part of users. Sig-
nificantly, computer technology is used for gaming and simulation, forms
that are employed for the purposes of training and skill acquisition, espe-
cially where motor functions are involved, and also to facilitate new types
of experiential learning. One question this raises is whether it is appropriate

to substitute a simulated experience for its actual counterpart. In some in-
stances, for example, the training of fighter pilots, simulated experience may
be the only option, or at least serve as preparation leading up to training in
actual flight. But is it acceptable to substitute a computer simulation for a
school chemistry lab, for example, in order to save on the time and space
needed to set it up, and the expense involved? And does new media’s partic-
ular bias towards gaming amount to another way in which serious content is
turned into an amusement and thereby devalued? Following a gaming simu-
lation, what do participants really take away, apart from a fun experience? In
addition to gaming, the activity of hacking computer programs and systems
is one of the powerful metaphors associated with new media, and we well
may ask if this is a key characteristic of the new media curriculum, to break
in and break down or, as gamers do, to find the cheat codes and otherwise
game the system. Programmed interactivity is quite distinct from real hu-
man interaction, and so we may also ask whether the lessons learned from
interacting with automated machinery are the same as those learned from
interacting with live human beings. Whether it involves being programmed
ourselves or hacking the programs, we still find ourselves involved in what
Martin Buber (1970) refers to as an I-It relationship, rather than the I-You
relationship that is the essence of education.
Sherry Turkle in Alone Together (2011) has cast a critical eye on our in-
creasing reliance on robots and artificial intelligence programs for the purposes
of human companionship, and also notes the similarities such parasocial in-
teractions hold with the limited range of human contact and narrow sense of
constant connection characteristic of computer-mediated communication and
social media interchanges. Whether this narrowing of human sensory expe-
rience detracts in significant ways from the function of education or instead
offers a kind of Platonic meeting of the minds in cyberspace is a matter of some
debate, but we can at least acknowledge that there is a difference between var-
ious forms of distance education and being co-present in the classroom. From
Postman’s perspective, using the same word, education, to describe what goes on
in a seminar or lecture hall, and what happens when people are typing at each
other from remote locations, is an example of the demeaning of meaning, just as
the word friend has been devalued when used to refer to superficial connections
made on social media sites, or the way that community is used to refer to group
interaction online, where there is no need for people with very different inter-
ests and concerns to negotiate ways of living together with one another.
Whether online instruction is carried out via text or audiovisual trans-

mission, there are economic advantages to reducing the need for physical
transportation and actual classrooms and buildings, but do the overall sav-
ings further the goals of schooling or simply cheapen the educational ex-
perience? There may be special instances in which distance education may
benefit some individuals who live in remote locations, who are physically
disabled, and possibly some who are economically disadvantaged, but should
accommodations made for special needs be extended to the general student
population? Can we use technology to bring the best teachers to the greatest
number of students, or does this merely create a new kind of star system? Is
good teaching only a matter of individual talent, and can it be scaled up-
wards indefinitely? As I write this, the latest fad in higher education is the
massive open online course, abbreviated as MOOC. A MOOC can contain
as many as 100,000 students, which raises the question of, in what sense is
a MOOC a course, and in what sense is the instructor actually teaching? It
is perhaps revealing that the acronym MOOC is a new variation on other
terms associated with new media, such as MMO, which stands for massive
multiplayer online (used to describe certain types of games), and the more
specific MMORPG, which stands for massive multiplayer online role-playing
game. These terms are, in turn, derived from older ones such as MUD,
multi-user dungeon, and MUSH, multi-user shared hallucination, and MOO,
multi-user dungeon, object oriented. In other words, the primary connotation
is with gaming, not education. Putting this genealogy aside, it is clear that
offering MOOCs is presently seen as a means of lending prestige to univer-
sities, and they may well be a means to bring education to masses of people
who could not otherwise afford a college course, and to individuals who are
not interested in pursuing traditional forms of education. But then again,
there is nothing new about the phenomenon of the autodidact, which was
made possible by the spread of literacy and easy availability of books. And
as Arendt (1960) argued,
The state of affairs, which indeed is equaled nowhere else in the world, can properly
be called mass culture; its promoters are neither the masses nor their entertainers, but
are those who try to entertain the masses with what once was an authentic object of
culture, or to persuade them that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and
educational as well. The danger of mass education is precisely that it may become
very entertaining indeed; there are many great authors of the past who have survived
centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will
be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. (pp. 284–285)
If nothing else, in considering the value of massive courses and online edu-
cation more generally, we might look to the preferences of the most affluent
members of our society. What do people with the means to afford any type of
education available tend to choose for their children, and for themselves? The
answer, of course, is traditional classrooms with very favorable teacher-student
ratios, if not private one-on-one tutoring (the same is true for children with
special needs, such as autism).
Of course, technology need not be used to substitute entirely for the
classroom, but instead may be introduced into the classroom as a means to
enhance teaching. One of Postman’s students, Margaret Cassidy (2004), car-
ried out a study of the history of educational technology, reviewing the intro-
duction of film, radio, television, computers, and new media to the classroom.
She found the same pattern repeating itself, from extravagant expectations of
a revolution in education, to difficulties in utilizing the technology, to even-
tual disillusion, distrust, and relative abandonment. Each new medium was
often promoted as a way to enhance teaching and make it more exciting, to
professionalize teaching through the use of the most up-to-date innovations,
and to make the best teachers available in mediated form in order to “teacher
proof the classroom” (p. 267), due to distrust of most teachers’ competence.
Each new medium was claimed to be a means to democratize education and
guarantee equality of pedagogical quality, and to make education more en-
tertaining in order to increase student engagement. She also found that the
impetus to adopt each new medium could be traced back to “military, govern-
ment, and/or corporate interests as much as—or more than—it has had to do
with the enhancement of the classroom experiences of teachers or students”
(p. 276). And of course there is the general interest in progress and innova-
tion for its own sake that Postman (1992) associated with technopoly.
The pattern repeats itself over and over again. New technologies are pro-
moted as the solution to the problems posed by teaching, but at the core, the
problem of education is a human one, not a matter of insufficient information
or inefficient methodologies. Reading and writing do not come naturally to
us, and they cannot be mastered while we are in motion, engaged in other ac-
tivities, or taking in too much in the way of sensory input. They require great
effort and discipline to master, beginning with the basic ability to sit still for
extended periods of time and focus our attention, activities that are entirely
unnatural for children. And they require a great deal of human interaction as
teachers mediate between students and texts. As Postman (1982) argued, to
the extent that children came to be sequestered away from the adult world in
schools, and the secrets of the adult world were withheld from them by virtue
of their being encoded in written form, the result was an extended childhood
and delayed initiation into the adult world, affording them a special status,
protecting them from the world, and giving them time to mature and devel-
op. The electronic media bypass this arrangement, giving young people direct
access to all of the secrets of the adult world, and to information on a scale
previously unimaginable. But in accessing that content through television,
computers, and mobile devices, they are often receiving and processing the in-
formation in isolation, without the presence of adults, of parents and teachers,
to help them to interpret and understand the content, to mediate the media.
Much has been made in recent years of the teacher being a guide on the
side rather than a sage on the stage, which is a reflection of the biases of the
electronic media environment, suggesting that students are capable of edu-
cating themselves and require only minimal guidance from the teacher. It is
certainly true that student engagement is vital for learning, and I can attest
to the fact that Postman as a teacher in the classroom was quite adept at gen-
erating class discussion. However, if this approach is taken to an extreme, we
get nothing less than the disappearance of teaching itself. In his final book,
Postman (1999) reminded us of the need to think about what our priorities
are in regard to education:
Will anyone disagree with the claim that we need more teachers and that we ought
to pay more to those we have? Nonetheless, school boards are resistant to hiring more
teachers and to paying them more, and complain continuously about a shortage of
funds. This resistance and those complaints not withstanding, the fact is that school
boards are now preparing to spend, in the aggregate, billions of dollars to wire schools
in order to accommodate computer technology, and for reasons that are by no means
clear. There certainly does not exist compelling evidence that any manifestation of
computer technology can do for children what good, well-paid, unburdened teachers
can do. (pp. 46–47)
Postman goes on to note that the main rationale given for providing Internet
access to schools is to give students access to information, which ignores the fact
that students already are suffering from information overload. Students need
ways to filter, interpret, and synthesize all this information, and this returns us
to the argument Postman makes in The End of Education (1995), that without
a god to serve, without a narrative to situate ourselves in and understand our
world by, we cannot have a functional system of education. Drowning in too
much information, distracted by too much entertainment, the disappearance of
teaching is tantamount to the disappearance of the school.
Education is of paramount importance to the future of a society, for, as

Postman (1982) so famously put it, “children are the living messages we send
to a time we will not see” (p. 1). And the question of how best to approach
education in order to deal with our changing media environment, and to im-
prove our chances for survival, is central to the field of media ecology. Indeed,
the inspiration for McLuhan’s famous saying, the medium is the message, are the
words of anthropologist Ashley Montagu (1958):
In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message. I should say
that there are few, if any, subjects which it were right to teach as if they were things
in themselves, but that everything a human being learns during his educational years
should be taught him as a vital part of the system of co-ordinates that is to form the
framework of his personal culture in relation to that of the rest of the world. (p. 62)
Montagu goes on to declare that, “the process of making a cultured man does
not depend upon the transmission of knowledge, but upon the manner in
which the knowledge is transmitted by the teacher” (p. 62). And he con-
cludes that “the good teacher is often the instrument of something greater
than himself” (p. 63). From a media ecology perspective, a teacher is a type of
medium, or put it another way, in education the teacher-student relationship
is the most important medium of all. And while technologies may extend
that primary medium, they also amputate some aspect of the teacher-student
relationship, eliminating some of the human quality that lies at the core of
education. Of course, schools and classrooms and books all are extensions of
teaching as well, and all have their costs as well as their benefits. The problem,
as always, is one of balance, and Postman championed the balance between
the printed word and oral discussion that represents the best of traditional ed-
ucation. It is an uneasy balance at best, one easily disrupted by continued in-
novation intruding into the classroom. As another counterpart to the insight
that the medium is the message, Hannah Arendt (1978) insisted that “there
are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous” (p. 176). And so the
question we are left with is, do all of our amazing new media and technologies
allow us the space and the time to pause, reflect, and think things over? Or is
our ability to think drowned out in a flood of images and noise, and pushed
aside in favor of calculation and automation?
·9·
the tempest
Neil Postman was well aware of the flaws and failures of American society,
both in the present and in the past, but he was also a proponent of Enlighten-
ment ideals and believed in the promise and potential of the American exper-
iment as a self-modifying and self-correcting system. Even as we find ourselves
slipping further and further into a Huxleyan dystopia, we retain the capacity
for creating Mumford’s (1922) measured concept of a utopia, the capacity to
make over our environment after a human pattern and to do so on the largest
scale imaginable. To a limited degree, Postman would agree with Abraham
Lincoln’s characterization of the American experiment as “the last best hope
of earth,” but would also echo Lincoln’s concern about “a nation so unhappily
distracted.” But now, it is not the horror of civil war that has sidetracked us,
but rather a more subtle war between states of mind and forms of discourse,
as we find ourselves diverted from a higher calling by a constant stream of
entertainment, information, and innovation. Postman’s arguments resonate
within all western cultures, throughout the developed world, and speak to
the future of humanity in its entirety, especially in an era of convergence and
globalization. And it all comes down to the question, can we think, and can
we talk, about what we are doing and where we are going?
McLuhan (1951) used the metaphor of the maelstrom, taken from Edgar
Allan Poe, to symbolize the chaos of the contemporary media environment.
In confronting the whirlpool, we find ourselves facing an overwhelming
force of nature, and this is how our media and technology appear to us at
first glance, as an irresistible force that is beyond our control, that leaves us
helpless to do anything except surrender to its imperatives. But McLuhan
argued that there is a way out, and that it begins with objective observation
of the phenomenon and pattern recognition, with the application of a me-
dia ecology approach to develop strategies for survival. This is exactly what
Postman proceeded to do in his work, and along with the maelstrom, I want
to suggest that the tempest serves as an apt metaphor for our present situa-
tion. Insofar as tempest denotes a violent windstorm or rainstorm, it seems
especially appropriate for the 21st century, as it relates to some of the most
noticeable effects of the climate change brought on by our technology. More
generally, being synonymous with disturbance, commotion, uproar, and tu-
mult, tempest represents the turbulent nature of the electronic media envi-
ronment as it has evolved via digital technologies, the Internet, the web,
social media, and mobile devices. Wave after wave of changes to our modes
of communication and interaction, our tools for thought and social action,
have altered and continue to alter our societies and our cultures, as well as
our psyches and our selves. As human beings, we are certainly well equipped
to survive a passing storm, but it is far from clear whether we can build a
sustainable way of life in the midst of permanent upheaval, be it natural or
cultural. How are we to survive while keeping our humanity intact? That is
the fundamental question raised by Postman, and by the field of inquiry he
called media ecology.
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, its main character being
Prospero, a powerful sorcerer living in exile on an island with his daughter
Miranda, having been deposed as duke of Milan by his brother Antonio. Using
his magical powers, Prospero learns that his brother is on a ship passing close
by, and creates a tempest that forces the ship to run aground on the island.
Upon seeing several of the shipwrecked sailors for the first time, Miranda,
whose only human contact since early childhood had been with her father and
the monstrous Caliban, exclaims
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t. (Act V, Scene I)
the tempest 137
Miranda is sincere, but misguided, in that the individuals she is commenting

upon are drunk and vulgar, and she is blinded by the novelty of their appear-
ance. The irony of her words was echoed by Huxley in choosing Brave New
World as the title of his novel. Within the book, Miranda’s lines are quoted
by the “savage” John, as he expressed his joy upon learning that he would be
taken to London. An innocent like Miranda, he later recognizes the dystopia
for what it truly is and, unable to cope with its mindless frivolity, he gives in
to despair and takes his own life.
In the brave new world that we occupy today, we have our modern-day
wizards who, like Prospero, unleash powerful forces upon our world, through
the agency of media and technology. And like Miranda, most of us celebrate
their efforts and the effects that result from them with unrestrained enthusi-
asm. And indeed there are times when celebration is appropriate, but there
also are times when it is not. To once again invoke Ecclesiastes, there is “a
time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance …
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; … a time to keep
silence, and a time to speak” (3: 4–7). The trouble is that, in the age of tele-
vision and technopoly, within the electronic media environment we inhabit,
the time is always a uniform 24/7/365, and the season never changes. And
yet, all our scientific and technological progress has not altered the fact that
we continue to be faced with serious issues and problems that demand our
attention, that require thoughtful deliberation, and that cannot be solved by
calculation and technical analysis alone. Democracy requires careful reflec-
tion, serious discussion, and difficult decision-making. But can we still reason
together, can the voices of reason still be heard, or are they being drowned
out by the laughter and applause generated by all of our amusements, and the
cheers and celebration that come in response to our technological wonders?
Postman’s position is that we can no longer afford to be as innocent as
Miranda, nor do we have any excuse for such naiveté. But he would also deny
the validity of John’s fatalism and self-destruction. Postman described Amus-
ing Ourselves to Death (1985) as a lamentation, but there is no question that it
was also written in the hope that we can reclaim a measure of control over our
media, our technology, and ourselves. He would certainly have no sympathy
for the violent responses of individuals such as Ted Kaczynski, aka the Un-
abomber, or the 9/11 terrorists, who saw themselves at war with modernity, or
postmodernity if you prefer, with what they perceived as the decadence of the
television age, and the oppression of technopoly. Postman advocated respect-
ful engagement, open dialogue, and being a loving resistance fighter. While he
did not reject the designation of neo-Luddite, noting that the Luddites were,
in fact, quite rationally trying to protect their jobs and salaries and their way
of life, Postman in truth was neither a technophobe nor a technophile. He
was not opposed to modernity as some have argued (e.g., Jensen, 1990), but
certainly was critical of what might be termed postmodernity (Strate, 1994,
2011). What he saw was a culture out of balance, one that has swung too far in
the direction of techno-optimism and the single-minded pursuit of pleasure, a
culture seemingly bent on bringing Huxley’s fictional world into reality.
There is no turning back the clock, no point in arguing that we abandon
our media and technology and try to retrieve an earlier age, a less advanced
way of life. Nor does it make sense to deny the legitimate benefits that our
inventions have brought us. What we need to do, then, is to engage in con-
certed evaluation of what we are doing and how we go about doing it, to
carefully weigh the costs and benefits of our technologies, to consider what
are the appropriate uses of our media, and what uses might be inappropriate,
and to proceed with caution, understanding that our innovations will always
result in unanticipated effects, many of which will also be undesirable. As
Joseph Weizenbaum argued in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976),
just because we can do something does not mean that we ought to do it. And
we need to take time in the implementation of our innovations. The problem,
however, is how to achieve such a fundamental change in our orientation
when our culture seems so radically committed to a never ending stream of
amusements and amazements.
In regard to becoming a loving resistance fighter, Postman (1992) makes
a number of practical suggestions for individuals to follow:
1. Do not take opinion polls seriously unless you are familiar with their
methodology, source, funding, and respondents;
2. Do not value efficiency above all else when it comes to human
relations;
3. Do not confer uncritical authority on numbers and quantification; un-
derstand that calculation and precision are not equivalent to human
judgment and truth;
4. Be skeptical of behavioral and social science research, especially when
it flies in the face of common sense;
5. Do not accept progress as an unmitigated good;
6. Remember that information is not equivalent to understanding;
7. Understand the value of age and experience;
the tempest 139
8. Understand the value of family, loyalty, and honor;

9. Understand the value of human presence and direct contact;
10. Do not assume that science has a monopoly on truth;
11. Understand the value of religion and its narratives; understand the
value of distinguishing between the sacred and the profane;
12. Understand the value of tradition; have respect for modernity and
technological advances, “but do not think it represents the highest
possible form of human achievement” (p. 184).
To this list, I would add some additional suggestions regarding what individuals
might do to resist the tempest, and temptations, of our times, and I hope you
will forgive me if some of these seem painfully obvious. Beginning with the spo-
ken word, make a concerted effort to engage in face-to-face conversation; for
families this also means establishing a dinner time when everyone is co-present
and able to talk to one another. Practice the art of oratory, especially since mak-
ing presentations in front of a group is often required in business and organiza-
tional settings and understand that what matters most is clarity and eloquence.
The spoken word should be paramount, and PowerPoint presentations should
be abandoned or relegated to the minor role of illustrating what is being said.
Recite poetry, an activity fundamental to the development of the human mind,
sing out loud, and play music. The art of memory has long been ignored, but
memorization is a valuable skill that should be nurtured. As Ong (1982) states,
“you know what you can recall” (p. 33), and strengthening memory through
practice and the application of mnemonic devices is a worthwhile goal.
Along with orality, literacy desperately needs to be encouraged. Reading
rewires the brain, and the wiring is not a permanent fixture, but needs to be
continually renewed. And as tempting as ebooks and ereaders may be, resist
the temptation to use them, because more and more they include digital dis-
tractions that break the concentration of reading, not to mention the fact
that you lose the sensual quality of holding a book in your hand. Reading
out loud as a form of entertainment also needs to be encouraged, especially
reading to children, but also in adult settings. Handwriting is becoming a lost
art, but there is value in putting pen to paper, in the art of calligraphy, and
in the simple act of copying passages out by hand. And by whatever means
necessary, write a letter to a loved one or friend, a real letter to be sent by the
postal service.
Postman (1985) acknowledged the efforts that individuals make in taking
part in TV turnoff events, and more recently there have been initiatives to
institute a National Day of Unplugging, and a practice of observing a weekly

Technology Sabbath (or Technology Shabbat). Rheingold (2012) recommends
engaging in meditation as a counterbalance to the biases of new media, and
as a way of training ourselves to become more aware of our attention, and
improve our ability to focus in light of the constant distraction of messaging,
alerts, and the impulse to click on links, cycle through windows and applica-
tions, etc. Rushkoff (2011) recommends resisting the impulse to continually
respond to or even check our messages, and instead take advantage of the
asynchronous quality of computer-mediated communication. The basic mes-
sage can be summed up as, simply, slow down, delay your responses, think
things through.
Even if we, as individuals, can find ways to cope with, let alone counter the
negative effects of the electronic media environment, the more significant con-
cern is what can be done on the macro level of society and culture. Can a crit-
ical attitude towards the electronic media be promoted through the electronic
media? One strategy is parody, and programs such as The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart, along with The Colbert Report, are especially noteworthy in their ability
to identify and ridicule the biases and excesses of broadcast journalism (Erion,
2007). The problem, as Postman (1985) notes in regard to this genre, is that
their primary goal remains creating audiences, and holding their attention by
providing entertaining content. Moreover, parody seems to generate an attitude
of cynicism, with no positive alternatives being presented. Digital technologies
can be used to provide individuals with both greater control and greater un-
derstanding of how television works, and therefore can promote media literacy
in certain ways. But this just pushes the problem back one media generation,
as new media have historically been used to unveil the hidden biases of the
older media, which, as McLuhan (1964) argued, are relegated to the status of
content within the new medium. But what is, in effect, a delegitimation of the
older medium only serves to strengthen the legitimacy and authority of the new
medium. How, then, can we ever get ahead of the runaway train of technology?
Placing limits on the development and diffusion of new technologies
would certainly seem advisable, but the prevailing sense is that if we do not
pursue the innovation, others will. While some constraints exist in the devel-
opment of medical technologies, they are not enough to prevent the distribu-
tion of medicines that later prove to be much more harmful than the disease
they purport to alleviate. In the absence of a global system of regulation that
imposes restraint on technology from the top down, competition will contin-
ue to drive invention and innovation, despite the potential for unforeseen
the tempest 141
and undesirable effects. In a technopoly, technology becomes an end in and of

itself, and the answer to any problem that any given innovation introduces is
simply more technology, which is why Ellul (1964) argued that technology, or
more properly technique and the technical system, has become autonomous
and subject to explosive geometric growth.
Perhaps the only alternative, then, is cultural change, or put another way,
change of the system itself, rather than merely change within the system that
leaves the system itself unchanged. Such change can be brought on by cata-
strophic events that force us to simplify our lifestyles, or perhaps set us back in
regard to technological progress; disaster scenarios such as nuclear war, global
warming, and other forms of climate change come readily to mind, along with
the vision of violent revolution on a global scale as once envisioned by Marx
and Engels (2007). It should be obvious that drastic and precipitous change
would neither be desirable nor in keeping with Postman’s advocacy for loving
resistance. He would not want us to give up on the goal of a peaceful transition
to a saner, sustainable society, perhaps one that could be considered a form of
post-civilization. And I believe he would argue that the American experiment
gave us the tools to make this transition, provided we do not pollute our serious
discourse with trivialities and technicalities.
Postman’s four case studies in Amusing Ourselves to Death, journalism, pol-
itics, religion, and education, represent the four cornerstones of the American
experiment, all emerging out of the typographic media environment. Our best
hope for the future, then, may lie in strengthening these institutions against
the onslaught of the electronic media environment and the technological
imperative.
Of the four, journalism is the most dependent on our media of commu-
nication and, arguably, the most endangered. Professional news organizations
need to understand that it is in their own best interests to produce literate
forms of expression, promote literacy, combat aliteracy, and encourage the
practice of reading, especially deep reading. Now more than ever, professional
journalists need to make overt reference to the logical organization of ideas
and arguments in their reporting, to the questions being asked and the ways
in which they shape the answers obtained, and to the distinctions between
facts, inferences, opinions, and definitions. There is great value in the abil-
ity to provide accurate accounts of situations and objective descriptions of
events, such as trained journalists are able to do, and there is a need for expe-
rienced news professionals to serve a gatekeeping function to help individuals
cope with information overload. Professional journalists can build on their
reporting with analysis of events, identification of their relationships to each

other, and synthesis into a broader picture of the environment. None of these
functions is exclusive to professionals, and journalists will need to cooperate
and collaborate with amateur reporters and independent opinionists, as well
as competing with them and finding new ways to make the case for the value
of their services as professionals. This should also involve a commitment to
developing new ways of organizing and presenting written reports electroni-
cally, with the understanding that audiovisual media may be used to illustrate
a story, but need to be placed in a subordinate position in regard to the written
word. And to be in the business of creating publics, professional journalists
and news organizations must make sure to position themselves as advocates
for the rights of citizens in a democratic society, to insist on rational discourse
in politics, and to engage in logical analysis and fact-checking of political and
commercial rhetoric.
Ultimately, however, it must be we, as citizens, who hold politicians to high-
er standards, and politicians themselves must be willing to cooperate by shifting
their emphasis from commercials, sound bites, and photo opportunities to the
presentation of policy proposals and discussion of issues in a manner accessible
to ordinary citizens. Plain language and plain writing in law and in politics can
help to counter the effects of television and technopoly alike. One of the biases
of the electronic media, and especially the new media, that is of benefit to a
democratic society is its emphasis on openness and transparency, and this needs
to be encouraged, but in such a way so as not to lead to information overload.
Here again, gatekeepers and opinion leaders are vital. In regard to the latter, a
renewed emphasis on local community is vital, both as a site of democratic par-
ticipation and a building block for involvement in government on a larger scale.
New media can be helpful, for example, via hyperlocal blogging, but ultimately
citizens need to meet face-to-face, and work together in making decisions and
taking action with real, concrete goals and consequences. Small steps with real
meaning are the only way that progress can be made, and ultimately there is no
substitute for being there, as novelist Jerzy Kosinski so aptly put it.
Current cultural conflicts seem to place religion in opposition to secular
society, but it is worth noting that the American experiment was founded in
part on religious pluralism and the rights of individuals to make up their own
minds about spiritual beliefs and practices. At the same time, the founders of
the nation understood the benefits of religious traditions in providing a moral
and ethical basis for human rights, and a sense of humility regarding the place
of the individual in the universe. Here again, there needs to be a middle path
the tempest 143
between the extremes of irrational religious extremism fueled by the audiovi-

sual content of the electronic media, and the hyperrational extreme atheism
associated with scientism and technopoly. This might involve finding ways
to encourage attendance at religious rituals and ceremonies at local houses
of worship, activities that might strengthen a sense of community, while also
providing for interfaith gatherings and dialogue, and emphasizing the bound-
aries that separate religion from other sectors of society. In particular, more
attention could be paid to the reading of sacred texts, especially outside of the
context of religious institutions. This could involve study that compares and
contrasts different religious texts and traditions, consideration of the processes
of translation and interpretation, and examination of the differences between
science and religion, both in regard to the kinds of questions each one asks,
and the kinds of answers and explanations each one obtains. Understanding
of the ways in which science and religion come into conflict, and the ways in
which they complement each other would be a worthwhile goal. Journalists
and politicians alike could play a part in repositioning religion within society
in such a way as to make it more relevant and less divisive, but religious lead-
ers and their followers must also be willing to adjust themselves accordingly.
Schooling is the institution most closely tied to literacy, and it is on ed-
ucation that Postman most fully pinned his hopes for the future. Resisting
the urge to substitute technology for teachers is paramount, recognizing that
quality in education begins with good teachers, well trained and not over-
burdened, with good student-teacher ratios that allow the student to receive
a good amount of individualized attention while also learning together with
others in a small group context. A back-to-the-basics approach might seem
in keeping with Postman’s emphasis on conservation, and he did suggest that
schools need to perform a cybernetic function, which requires education based
on literacy and typography, on the spoken and written word, and on reason
and rationality, against the extremes of idolatry and efficiency, image culture
and technopoly. But he also consistently argued for the inclusion of teaching
about language and symbol use, and media ecology.
McLuhan (1964) explained that our media and technology function
as environments, fading into the background as they become routine, and
thereby becoming invisible to us. In order to bring them back into conscious
awareness, he argued that we need to find anti-environments or counter-en-
vironments, environments whose bias runs counter to those of the prevailing
environment, thereby providing us with a vantage point from which to ob-
jectively observe and assess our main environment, and find the patterns that
may allow us to escape the maelstrom or tempest. For McLuhan, art was the
answer, insofar as it allowed for the training of perception, so as to understand
the ways in which media shape and modify our senses, and our thought pro-
cesses and view of the world. Religious traditions, having emerged out of old-
er media environments, can also provide us with counter-environments and
thereby help to perform the cybernetic function that Postman looked for. But
Postman’s answer was always and above all education. Especially within the
context of the American experiment, schools have long been the medium we
have turned to in order to guarantee the promise of equality of opportunity,
to integrate immigrants into American culture, and to try to address all man-
ner of social problems. We therefore might look for schools to incorporate
the history of the arts and comparative religion into their curricula, along
with the study of language, symbolic communication, media, and technology
as the perfect interdisciplinary base to bind these different subjects together
into a coherent whole. Media ecology is Postman’s best alternative for finding
an overarching narrative to organize a system of education, emphasizing the
story of the human species that includes the progress we have made, as well
as the backsliding, that emphasizes Enlightenment values and the American
experiment as a utopian ideal, not of perfectibility, but of the possibility of
things continually getting better by building on the positive achievements
of the past, through the elimination of error, and through a commitment to
improving on the human condition without sacrificing the very things that
make us human.
I believe it is fitting at this point to note that Postman, in his conclusion
to Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), wrote that Huxley
believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster,
and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and
epistemology of media. 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. (p. 163)
In considering what is at stake as we consider the dystopian possibilities of both

Orwellian totalitarianism and a Huxleyan world of pleasure and automation,
it is also worth considering Huxley’s last words in Brave New World Revisited
(1958):
Meanwhile, there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is
true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, without freedom,
the tempest 145
human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely
valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted
for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them. (pp. 122–123)
How are we to resist them in the loving manner that Postman called for?
The key remains one of context, finding the appropriate contexts for the
specific purposes we have in mind, the appropriate medium for the kinds
of communication we wish to engage in, the appropriate environment for
living a fully human life. And perhaps we might find some inspiration from
Shakespeare in his conclusion to The Tempest, as Prospero gives up his sor-
cery, his equivalent of our media and technology, and embraces the world of
rationality, and reconciliation with family and community, in preparing to
return home from exile. He gives his final appeal in the form of an epilogue
to the play:
Now my charms are all o’erthrown,

And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint: now, ‘tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
And with that, Prospero asks the audience to signal their approval by their
applause. In the same way, Postman could do no more than send a message
to those who were and are willing to attend to it, a message sent in his own
time, but also to a time he did not see. The meaning of his message, and now
my own, resides in you as a reader, in your thinking, and in your actions. We
can conclude that change is needed, and that the change we need begins with
our discourse, the basis of collective action. Against the fact that we have
been fiddling about as we are amusing, informing, and amazing ourselves to
death, we must counter all of our crazy and stupid talk with sane and intelli-
gent dialogue. Only in that way can we start speaking, thinking, and teaching
ourselves back to life.
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index
9/11, 90–92, 137 Allen, Woody, 17

1984, 7–11, 105, 111, 152 alphabet, 7, 34, 47, 50–51, 54, 58–60, 69,
71, 77, 118, 126
American creed, American experiment, 17,
A 38, 65, 135, 141–142, 144
American cultural studies, 45
abstract forms, 15–16, 53–54, 61–62, 68, Ames, Adelbert, 22, 23, 29, 147
117–118, 120 amusement, see entertainment
access (to information), xiv, 39, 50–52, analogical, 53, 74
60–65, 67, 71–72, 76–77, 96–97, Ancient Aliens, 127
100–102, 112, 127, 132, 142 Animal Planet cable channel, 127
acoustics, 49, 52, 68, 114–115 animism, 120
ad hominem fallacy, 88 Apple Computer, 8, 105
Adams, Douglas, 58 See also Macintosh operating system
adulthood, 34, 61, 72, 121 Arendt, Hannah, 9, 130, 133, 147
advertising, xv, 8, 35, 41, 61, 73, 76, 85–86, Aristotle, 57, 62, 88, 147
98, 104–106, 108, 111, 113, 114, 117, Arlo, Raymond, 27, 147
126, 142 Arsenio Hall Show, 106
aggregators, 97–98 artificial intelligence, 129
Albrecht, Robert, ix, 114, 147 Asimov, Isaac, 17
aliteracy, 67, 141 atheism, 122, 143
Al-Jazeera, 96 Augustine, 119
158 index
authorship, 15–16, 61, 66, 130 biology, 29, 30, 44, 119
autopoiesis, 57 Birdwhistell, Ray L., 31, 147
Ayatollah, see Khomeini blogging, blogs, xiii, 86, 97, 99, 111–112,
142
Bloom, Harold, 119, 148
B Bolter, Jay David, 44, 54, 148
Bono, Sonny, 107
Baby Boomers, 72 Boobah, 126
Bacall, Lauren, 17 books (as media), 11, 15, 24, 41, 45, 55, 66,
Bachmann, Michele, 110 79, 130, 133, 139, 147–156
Bakker, Jim and Tammy Faye, 116 Boorstin, Daniel J., 65–67, 90, 103, 109,
balance (as ecological value or ideal), xv, 118, 148
4–6, 30, 33, 37, 53, 59, 78, 90, 111, Borisoff, Deborah, 40, 149
117, 120, 122, 133, 138, 140 Boston Globe, 95,
Bateson, Gregory, 5, 31–32, 53, 147 Boulding, Kenneth E., 31, 148
Baudrillard, Jean, 66–67, 147 Bradbury, Ray, 24
Bavelas, Janet B., 31, 47, 53, 155 brain structure and function, 49, 79–81, 139
BBC News, 96 Brave New World, xii, 8, 10–13, 75, 100,
beer commercials, 35, 154 111, 136–137, 144–145, 150
behavioral science, 31, 36, 57, 111, 138 Brinkley, David, 85
Bellamy, Edward, 7, 24 broadcasting, 35, 52, 68, 71–75, 85, 87–88,
Beniger, James R., 10, 77, 147 92–94, 106, 114–117, 128, 140
Benjamin, Walter, 67, 114, 119, 147 Brokaw, Tom, xiii, 85–87
Bentsen, Lloyd, 104 Brooks, Mel, 17
Berra, Yogi, 5 Brown, Jerry, 111
Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, 31, 147 Buber, Martin, 129, 148
bias, biases Burgess, Earnest W., 30
regarding gender, 87 Bush, George H. W., 104, 105
of literacy and writing, 16, 61, 67, 70 Bush, George W., 75, 86, 104, 107
of a medium (of media and technology in Butler, Samuel, 7
general), 34–35, 39, 49, 67, 140, 143
of new media, xiv, 99, 112, 128–129, 132,
140, 142 C
of news media, 65–67, 140
of orality, 6–7 cable news networks, 86–87, 89, 91–97
of space, 59 cable television, xi, 73, 74, 87, 92–93, 96,
of telegraphy, 72–73, 128 105–106, 116, 126–127
of television, 12, 49, 68, 72–73, 75, 85, Cain, Herman, 104
89, 93, 116–118, 140 California, 20–21, 107, 111
of time, xiii, 45, 59 camera, 55, 67–68, 87–91, 102, 104, 106,
of typography, 16, 67, 70, 126–127 108–109, 116–117, 125
political and economic, 65, 93–94, 96 cameras in the courtroom, 4, 35, 116
Biden, Joe, 106 Campbell, Jeremy, 52, 57, 148
bin Laden, Osama, 121 capitalism, 52, 60, 62, 64
index 159
Capra, Fritjof, 31, 148 as an environment, 26, 31, 34, 48, 89

Carey, James W., 31, 45, 47, 69, 70, 148 as a field, 20, 25–26, 29, 31, 42–43,
Carlyle, Thomas, 64, 148 45–47
Carpenter, Edmund, 21, 22, 24, 29, 44, 46, electronically mediated, 13, 53, 64, 69,
148 71–73, 78, 88, 107, 111, 114, 116,
Carr, Nicholas, 79, 127, 148 119, 128–129, 140
Carter, Jimmy, 103 face–to–face, 15–16, 32, 45, 63
Casey, Cheryl Anne, ix, 121, 148 history of, 46
Cassidy, Margaret, ix, 131, 148 instantaneous, 45, 49, 69, 71–73
Cassirer, Ernst, 22, 148 literate and written modes of, 12, 15
Cathcart, Robert, 46, 150 many–to–many, 46
celebrity, 90, 98, 109–110, 116, 118 mass, 45, 52
cell phone, see mobile device media of (in general), 22–26, 31, 34,
centralization, 64 46–48, 55, 59, 64, 141, 145
channel mediated interpersonal, 46
in reference to television, 73–74, 92, public, 18, 99
95–96, 115–116, 126 symbolic, 22, 44, 50, 52, 57, 59, 78, 144
as synonym for medium, 47 technologies, and techniques of, 34, 36,
Chesebro, James W., 40, 149 46, 48–49
Chicago Sun-Times, 90 characteristics of, 49–55
childhood, xiii, 17, 33–35, 49, 51, 61, 65, as transportation, 47–48
72–73, 121, 126, 131–133, 136, 139 typographic, 64–65
China, 58, 60 communications revolution, 21, 23, 77
Chomsky, Noam, 21, 148 Communism, 122
Christianity, 18, 113, 118, 121 community, 64, 99–100, 117, 121, 129,
Christie, Chris, 106 142–143, 145
Chung, Connie, 87 computer, xii, 8, 37, 48, 52, 54–56, 75–81,
cinema, see motion picture 97–99, 119, 126–132, 138, 140
civil rights, 72, 86, 123 computer and information science, 44, 77
clergy, 117–118, 121 concentration of ownership, 52
Clinton, Bill, 16, 39, 104–106, 109 concrete forms, 16, 53–54, 61–62, 68, 72,
Clinton, Hillary, 105, 111 114, 117–118, 142
CNBC, 92 conditions of attendance, 39, 55, 73, 115
CNN, 87, 92–93, 95, 104 Congress (United States), 89–90, 93,
Colbert Report, 96, 140 107, 116
Columbia University, 20 consciousness, 36, 55, 62, 75, 123
Columbus, Christopher, 62 consumers, consumerism, xv, 25, 73, 76, 77,
Comedy Central (cable channel), 42, 96 108, 113, 114, 122
commerce, 32, 57, 95, 113, 142 context, 4, 6, 10, 15, 16, 31, 32, 36, 46, 49,
See also economics, financial affairs 70, 73, 91–92, 94, 96, 101, 114–115,
communication 120–121, 143–145
vs. anticommunication, 99, 105 See also environment, situation
content and relationship level of, 46–47 context analysis, 31
and culture, 40, 44–46 control revolution, 10, 77
160 index
Corddry, Rob, 42 Dewey, John, 22, 147, 148

corporations, 52, 74–75, 102, 131 de Zengotita, Thomas, 70, 148
Couric, Katie, 86–87 dialectical approach, 59
Craigslist, 98 discursive symbolic form, 53–54
crap detecting, 23 Digg, 97
crawl (across screen), see ticker digital
Cronkite, Walter, 85, 96 broadcasting, 74
C-SPAN, 93, 96, 116 cameras, 91
Culkin, John, 29, 56, 148 communication, 53–54
culture, xv, 5–6, 19, 21, 29–31, 33–34, 35, computers, 77
41, 44, 55, 57, 59, 74, 138–140, 144 divide, 128
Californian, 21 media and technologies, 54, 99, 136,
contemporary American (in general), 139–140
xi, xv, 4–5, 11–13, 33, 36–38, 58, 81, natives vs. immigrants, 72
86–88, 117–118, 120–122, 135–138 Dirksen, Everett, 108
electronic culture, 69–81, 94–96, 99–102, discourse, 32, 135
105–109, 130 political, 103, 105, 111
image culture, 67–69, 78, 109, 118, 143 public, xi, 12, 32, 41, 65, 74, 76, 81, 96,
Jewish, 19 103, 141–142, 146
literate and print, 7, 12, 33, 34, 39, 51, religious, 19
53, 55, 58, 59, 60–67, 94, 122 shaped by literacy and print, 16, 111
New York, 21 shaped by television, 99–100
oral, 51, 53, 88, 95, 101, 120 telegraphic, 70–71, 73, 78, 91–92, 103,
postliterate, 12, 28, 102, 120 127–128
scribal, 46, 59, 62 verbal, 91
western, 53, 58, 60, 68, 69, 135 Discovery Channel, 127
cyberspace, 37, 129 Disney, Walt, 127
Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan, 127
Dole, Bob, 104
D doublespeak, doublethink, 8
Drucker, Peter, 24
Daily Show, 42, 96, 140 Drucker, Susan, x, 40, 149, 155
Damon, Howard C., 22, 153 Drudge Report, 97
database, 127 Dukakis, Michael, 104, 108
Deacon, Terrence W., 5, 57. 148 Duncan, Hugh Dalziel, 31, 148
Dean, Howard, 109, 111 dystopia, 7–13, 135–137, 144–145
death, 4, 11, 98, 117
death penalty, 104
debates, 40, 103–104, 108 E
decentralization, 47
decontextualization, 15, 70, 114 ebooks, 79, 139
Deibert, Ronald, 98 Ecclesiastes, 4, 137
democracy, 3–4, 12, 17, 20, 63–64, 76, 81, ecology, 4, 23–24, 30–32, 36–37, 39, 44, 56
99–102, 122, 137 See also media ecology
index 161
economics, 6, 39, 44, 49, 57–58, 62, 64, 65, anti- or counter-, 143–144
76, 122, 130 communication, 26, 31–32, 89–90
See also commerce, financial affairs desktop, 55
education, xv, 17, 18, 20–25, 27, 29–30, 32– information, 34, 86
35, 37–38, 42, 45, 47, 51, 57, 63, 65–66, invisible, 44, 74, 143
111, 122, 125–133, 141, 143–144 media, xi, 24–26, 28–31, 36, 46–50, 55,
educational technology, 125, 127–132 59–61, 100, 143
educational television,125–127, 131 alphabetic, 118
effects of innovations, media, technology, American, 60, 73
xi, xiv, xv, 11, 30, 37, 48, 55–58, 61, contemporary, xiv, 5, 72, 74, 75, 78,
63, 70, 72, 74, 76, 80–81, 99, 104, 120– 85, 99, 115, 133, 136
121, 136–138, 140–142 electronic, 33, 74, 86, 99, 102, 109,
efficiency, 12–13, 37, 75, 77–78, 97, 105, 119–122, 132, 136–137, 140–141
111, 128, 131, 138, 143 scribal, 63
Eisenhower, Dwight, 106 typographic, 33, 64, 72, 102–103, 110,
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 7, 24, 60–63, 148 118, 141
elections, 66, 89, 102–104, 107, 111 natural, xiv–xv, 30, 34, 36–37, 48, 56, 111
electricity, electric technology, 30, 48, 49, political, 93
50, 69–70, 91–92, 111, 113 sacred vs. profane, 115
electronic age, 27, 80 semantic, 23, 32, 34, 114
Electronic Freedom Foundation, 98 social and cultural, xv, 33, 49, 56
electronic media, 6, 10, 13, 18, 33, 34, symbolic, 30, 34
37, 44, 50, 52–55, 58, 69–71, 77–78, technological, 5, 30–31, 37, 48, 56, 143
80–81, 103, 111–112, 113–115, 117, See also context, situation
119–123, 132, 140–143 epistemology, 48, 78, 144
environment of, 33, 99, 102, 109, Erion, Gerald J., 140, 149
119–122, 132, 136–137, 140–141 Ervin, Sam, 108
electronic tribalism, 99 ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 33
Eliade, Mircea, 7, 114, 149 ethos, 25, 88
Elijah, 123
Ellul, Jacques, 6, 10, 13, 24, 51, 67, 75, 78,
111, 118, 141, 149 F
email, 40, 42, 55, 70, 115, 121, 127
emergence, 57 Fabun, Don, 24
Engels, Friedrich, 141, 151 Facebook, 97–98, 127
English education, 4, 8, 20, 22–24, 26–27, Fallon, Peter K., ix, 76, 149
29, 42 Falwell, Jerry, 116
Enlightenment, 12, 20, 35, 38–39, 62, fascism, 122
64–65, 81, 122, 135, 144 feedback, 5, 33, 70
entertainment, 3–4, 10–13, 49, 51, 78, 89, Fiddler on the Roof, 5–6
96, 99–100, 102, 107–109, 113, 116, film, see motion picture
121, 127, 129, 132, 135, 137–139 financial affairs, 60, 91–92, 96, 98, 99, 111,
environment, 6, 12, 24, 30, 68, 80, 135, 117
142–145 See also commerce, economics
162 index
Financial News Network, 92 Goody, Jack, 7, 62, 120, 149–150

Fiore, Quentin, 54, 151 Google, 80, 97, 127
First Amendment, 64, 94 Gore, Al, 96, 104, 111
Fisch, Richard, 31, 155 Grandy, Fred, 107
Ford, Gerald, 103, 108 graphical user interface (GUI), xiii, 55,
Ford, Henry, 12 128, 140
Fordham University, x, 29 “great divide,” 52, 59–60, 63
form, 30, 34, 39, 47, 52–54, 57, 68, 69, 72, Greece, 7, 58, 60
97, 128 Groening, Matt, xiii
formal cause, 57 Grusin, Richard, 44, 54, 148
Forsdale, Louis, 20–22, 149 Gumpert, Gary, ix, 46, 150, 155
Fox News, 92–95 Gutenberg, Johann, 7, 44, 46, 58, 60,
Franken, Al, 107 62–63, 79
freedom, xii, 7–9, 12, 64, 94, 100, 144–145
Freud, Sigmund, 44, 57
friend, friending, 118, 129 H
Frommer, Harvey, 16–18, 149
Frommer, Myrna, 16–18, 149 Haeckel, Ernst, 30
Fuller, R. Buckminster, 6, 24, 149 Hahn, Dan F., 40, 149
fundamentalism, 121–122 Hall, Edward T., 21, 24, 31, 46, 52, 88,
future (as a concept or orientation), xi–xii, 150
4–12, 24–25, 58, 72, 76–77, 81, 94, handwriting, 48, 54, 94, 139
100, 122, 133, 135, 141, 143 See also scribal culture, writing
future shock, 4–5 Hart, Gary, 104
Harvard University, 40
Havelock, Eric A., 7, 16, 24, 51, 150
G Hawley, Amos H. 31, 150
Hayakawa, S. I., 20, 22, 33, 150
Gabler, Neal, 90, 149 Hebrew, 17, 114
game shows, 88, 101–103 Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, 127
games, gaming, 53, 128–130 history, 7, 21, 42, 43, 44, 46, 58, 62, 73, 75,
Garfunkel, Art, 113 76, 131, 144
Geddes, Patrick, 30, 149 History Channel, 127
Gencarelli, Thom F., ix, 16, 33, 40, 149 Hitler, Adolf, 9, 10
gender, 51, 87 Hobart, Michael E., 50, 77, 150
general semantics, xiii, 20–23, 32–33, 45 Hollerith, Herman, 77
Gibson, Mel, 118 Hollywood, 21, 107, 113
Gillette, Frank, 27, 156 Holocaust, 17–18, 123
global village, 73, 102 Horton, Donald, 88, 118, 150
God, 63, 75, 117–119, 123 Huffington Post, 97
gods, 113, 119, 122–123, 132 humanity, human species, 4, 6, 34, 42, 48,
Goffman, Erving, 24, 31, 46, 149 50, 57–58, 59, 135–136, 144
Goldberg, Adele, 54, 150 Hunt, Arthur W. 118, 150
Goodman, Eric, 89 Huntley, Chet, 85
index 163
Huxley, Aldous, xii, 8, 10–12, 24, 74, 75, 100, Islam, 121
111, 120, 135, 137–138, 144–145, 150 Israel, 7, 58, 60
hybrid energy, 102
hyperlinks, 78, 127
hyperlocal, 142 J
hyperrationality, 78, 122, 128, 143
hyperreality, 67, 78, 119, 128 Jackson, Don D., 31, 47, 53, 155
hypertext, 127 Jennings, Peter, 85–86
Jensen, Joli, 138, 150
Jesuits, 63
I Jesus, 118
Jewish culture, Judaism, 16–19
ideology, 62, 94, 110–111 Jobs, Steve, 98
image, images, 6, 34–36, 42, 47, 53–54, 61, Johnson, Lyndon, 103–104
63, 67–69, 71–72, 78, 87–88, 90–91, Johnson, Wendell, 22, 32, 150
115–118, 126, 128, 133, 143 journalism, xiii, 35, 42, 64, 66, 86, 91,
image culture, see culture 93–99, 140–143
image politics, 105–107, 109–111 See also news
prohibition against graven images, 113 Judd, Ashley, 107
individualism, 61, 64, 102, 110
industrialism, industrial era, Industrial
Revolution, 6–7, 12, 58, 67, 77 K
information, 11, 34, 39, 48, 50, 60, 63–64,
69–71, 76–78, 80, 88, 91–92, 95–98, Kaczynski, Ted, 137
131–132, 135, 138 Kahn, Herman, 24
accessibility of, see access Kay, Alan, xiii, 54, 150
information age, 58 Kaye, Danny, 17
information environment, see environ- Kennedy, Bobby, 86
ment Kennedy, John F., 40, 86, 103, 104, 106,
information overload, 40, 50, 76, 92, 100, 108
132, 141–142 Kennedy, Ted, 106
information science, 44 Kerry, John, 104–105
information theory, 77 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 121
information technology, xii, 10, 37, 76 King, Martin Luther, 86
Innis, Harold A., 5, 24, 49, 51, 59, 63, 69, 150 Kirk, G. S., 7, 150
innovation, xii, xiv–xv, 7, 13, 36–37, 47, Kissinger, Henry, 108
56–57, 64, 76, 131, 133, 135, 138, knowledge, xiv, 6–7, 16, 24, 34, 35, 50–52,
140–141 60, 62–64, 77, 97, 101, 121, 133
inquiry method, 23, 25 Koch, Edward, 108
instant messaging, 115 Kony 2012 video, 98
instantaneity, 45, 49, 69, 71–72, 117 Koppel, Ted, 41, 86
Internet, xi, 37, 47, 50, 52, 54, 74–75, Korzybski, Alfred, 22, 23, 29, 50, 150
78–80, 91, 96, 98–99, 105–106, Kosinski, Jerzy, 142
111–112, 115–116, 120–121, 132, 136 Koufax, Sandy, 17
Iran, 86, 121 Kuhns, William, 44, 150
164 index
L mass production, 12, 67–68

Maturana, Humberto R., 57, 151
Langer, Susanne. K., 22, 24, 53, 59, 150–151 Maushart, Susan, ix–x, 81, 151
language, 8–10, 15, 17, 19, 21–23, 36, 30, McCain, John, 104, 110
32, 34–35, 37–42, 44, 46–52, 54, 57, McGovern, George, 108
60–61, 66, 71, 128, 142–144 McKenzie, Roderick D., 31
See also linguistics, linguistic relativism McLuhan, Eric, 29, 56–57, 119, 151
Las Vegas, 21, 113 McLuhan, Marshall, 7, 20–24, 27–29, 41,
Lasswell, Harold, 24 43–45, 48, 50, 52–54, 56–57, 59–60,
Laszlo, Ervin, 31, 151 64, 68–74, 80, 99, 102, 104, 106, 119,
laws of media, 56 133, 136, 140, 143–144, 151
Learning Channel, The, 127 Mead, George Herbert, 31, 151
Lee, Dorothy, 9, 151 meaning, 9, 15, 23, 32, 54–55, 67, 71, 89,
Leno, Jay, 96, 108 114, 129
Letterman, David, 96 means, 6, 12, 47–48, 54, 60, 69, 75, 76, 105,
Levinson, Paul, x, 46, 50, 78, 97, 105, 151 118, 122, 130–131
Lincoln, Abraham, 17, 103, 135 See also media, method, technique,
linearity, 7, 30, 47, 57, 61, 68, 70–71, 73, technology
78. 92, 126–127 mechanization, 6, 52, 60
linguistics, 20–22, 29 media (in general), 30–31, 41, 45–58, 64,
See also language 66, 74, 119, 131, 133, 140, 144–145
linguistic relativism, 9, 21, 29, 42, 78 media ecology, ix, xi–xii, 19, 23–31, 33–34,
Lippert, Paul, ix, 128, 151 36–38, 40–42, 43–58, 59–60, 133, 136,
literacy, 16, 24, 44, 51, 53, 59, 61, 63, 65, 143–144
67, 72, 78, 80, 118, 120, 128, 130, graduate program, ix, 25–27, 29, 40, 125
139–141, 143 Media Ecology Association, x, 40, 41, 44–45
See also media literacy, reading, writing media environment, xi, xiv, 25, 28, 31, 36,
Love Boat, 107 49–55, 59, 61, 100
Luddites, 138 evolving American, 59–81
Lum, Casey Man Kong, ix, 16, 33, 43, 45, 151 electronic, 33, 72, 74, 75, 78, 85, 99–100,
Luther, Martin, 63 102, 109, 115, 119–122, 132–133,
136–137, 140–141
scribal, 63, 118, 144
M typographic, 64, 72, 102–103, 110, 118,
141, 144
Macintosh operating systems, xiii, 55 media epistemology, see epistemology
See also Apple computer media literacy, 22, 140
magazines, 20, 27, 40, 45, 52, 55 mediation, 16, 49, 63, 73
Mailer, Norman, 17 Meeks, Patricia, 27
Manovich, Lev, 127, 151 memory, 6–7, 15–16, 50, 53, 80, 139
Marx, Karl, 141, 151 Mermaids: The Body Found and Mermaids:
mass communication, mass media, 32, The New Evidence, 127
45–46, 52, 61, 65–68, 86, 117 metamedium, 54, 99
mass culture, 130 metaphor, 3, 21, 23, 29, 30, 36, 38, 45, 47,
mass education, 130 56, 68, 97, 102, 122, 129, 136
index 165
method, 8, 23–25, 31, 34, 47–48, 62, 64–65, Mumford, Lewis, 6, 12, 24, 48, 59, 65, 69,
77, 122, 131, 133, 138 135, 152
See also means, media, technique, tech- Murrow, Edward R., 85, 108
nology MUSH (multi-user shared hallucination),
Meyrowitz, Joshua, ix, 44, 51–52, 72, 86, 130
109, 151 music, 4–6, 38, 43, 46, 89, 102, 105–106,
microphone, 55 113–115, 118, 123, 139
Mill, John Stuart, 7
Miller, William, 108
MMO (massive multiplayer online) game, 130 N
MMORPG (massive multiplayer online
role-playing game), 130 Nader, Ralph, 25, 108
mobile device, xi, 50, 52, 53, 55, 75, 80, 90, narrative, 7, 19, 61–62, 70, 73, 122,
98, 111, 115, 119, 121, 126, 132, 136 126–129, 132, 139, 144
mode of address, mode of delivery, 55, narrowcasting, 117
88–89 Nasaw, David, 61, 65, 152
modernity, 6, 7, 53–54, 58, 63–64, 68, 78, Nation magazine, xiii, 20
113, 115, 121, 137–139 National Council of Teachers of English, 4,
Mondale, Walter, 104 8, 22, 23–24, 26–27
monopoly of knowledge, 51, 63–64, 97, 121 National Geographic Channel, 127
monotheism, 118, 120 nationalism, 55, 58, 61, 63–64, 69–70, 86
Monster.com, 98 Navasky, Victor, xiii, 20
Montagu, Ashley, 133, 151 Nazism, 10, 122
MOO (multi-user dungeon, object orient- neo-paganism, 120
ed), 130 neo-tribalism, 101, 120
MOOC (massive open online course), 130 Nero, 3, 5
Moonshiners, 127 network
morality, 3, 6, 33, 36, 40, 72, 75–76, 109, communication, 34, 47, 86
116, 120, 123, 142 intellectual, 45
Moran, Terence P., ix, 23, 25–26, 29, 32, neural, 80
110, 151 social, 98
More, Thomas, 7 television, 41, 85–87, 89–96
Morine, Greta, 22, 153 terrorist, 121
Morine, Harold, 22, 153 New Age spirituality, 120
Morris, William, 6–7 new media, participatory media, xii, xiv,
Morse, Samuel, 69 46, 51–52, 77, 86, 112, 115, 120–121,
Morse code, 69, 71 127–133, 140, 142
Mostel, Zero, 17 See also gaming, online communication
motion picture, 10, 31, 45, 51–52, 55, 68, New York City, 11, 17–21, 29, 44, 69, 90,
72–73, 90, 107–108, 118–119, 131 92, 110, 113, 127
MSNBC, 92–94, 96 New York Times, 70, 92, 99
MTV, 106 New York University, xiii, 21, 23, 25, 27, 40
MUD (multi-user dungeon), 130 news, xiii, xiv, 32, 35, 45, 63, 66–67, 69,
Mueller, Claus, 9, 152 85–100, 103–104, 109–110, 141–142
multiculturalism, 122 See also journalism, newspaper
166 index
newspapers, 45, 52, 55, 61, 63, 65–71, parody, 105, 140
90–92, 95, 98–99 parasocial interaction, parasocial relation-
news ticker, see ticker ships, 88, 118, 129
Nixon, Richard, 103, 106, 108 Park, David, x, xiii
North American intellectual tradition, 45 Park, Robert E., 30
Nostradamus Effect, 127 Parker, Harley, 29
number (as symbolic form), 53, 78, 111, past (as a concept or orientation), xi, 6, 10,
126, 128, 138 62–63, 66, 72, 77, 94
See also numeracy, quantification Paul, Ron, 110
numeracy, 61, 77, 126 PBS, 86, 93, 96, 126
Nystrom, Christine, ix, xii, 26–27, 29, 31, perception, 24, 30, 34, 38, 44, 48, 51–53,
35, 41, 44, 79, 152, 154 71, 144
Perkinson, Henry, 35, 72, 77, 86, 89, 123,
152
O Petraeus, David, 109
phenomenology, 48
Obama, Barack, 10, 76, 95, 98, 104–107, photography, 51, 54, 67–69, 72–73, 90–91,
110–111 118, 122
objectivity, 16, 53, 65, 67, 93–94, 102, 136, Photoshop, 54
141, 143 Piland, Virginia, 27
Occupy movement, 110–111 Plato, xi, 7, 15, 44, 62, 152
Ogden, C. K., 22, 152 playlists, 114
Ong, Walter J., 7, 24, 43, 44, 47, 52–53, 65, Poe, Edgar Allan, 136
68, 71–72, 95, 114, 123, 128, 139, 152 poetry, 5, 46, 136, 139, 145
online communication, 80, 86, 98, 111–112, political science, 42, 44
116, 120, 127, 129 politics, political campaigns, xiv, 3, 6, 8–9,
online education, 130–131 19–20, 30, 32, 35, 37, 39, 49, 57–58,
online gaming, 130 62, 64–65, 70, 75–76, 89–90, 93–94,
online writing, 79 96, 98, 101–112, 116, 141–144
orality, oral culture, 7, 28, 44, 46, 49–51, polls, 105, 107, 111, 138
53, 59, 61–63, 78, 79, 88, 95, 101–102, polytheism, 120
120, 133, 139 Popper, Karl, 35, 152–153
O’Neill, Tip, 108 post-civilization, 141
Ono, Yoko, xiii Postman, Andrew, ix, xiii, 18, 20, 21, 28,
Oprah Winfrey Show, 103 38, 41, 153
O’Reilly, Bill, 95 Postman, Shelley, ix, 16, 20–21
Orwell, George, 7–12, 24, 74, 111, 144, 152 postmodern, postmodernism, 58, 66, 95,
137–138
Powers, Steve, 35, 154
P presence, 15, 48, 72, 90, 115–116, 129, 139
present, present-centered, 4–6, 10, 15, 25,
Paglia, Camille, 40, 45, 118, 152, 154 33, 71–72, 100
Paik, Nam June, 5 presentational symbolic form, 53, 72–73
Paine, Thomas, 17, 64 Presley, Elvis, 106
Palin, Sarah, 110 Prichard, Karen, 27
index 167
printing, print media, 7, 12, 16, 28, 30, Ramist education, 65

33–34, 37, 39, 44, 46, 50–55, 58–72, Rasiej, Andrew, 98
74, 77–79, 81, 87, 91, 94, 99, 110, 112, Rather, Dan, 85–86
127, 133 rationalism, xv, 11, 12, 20, 38–39, 62, 64,
See also books, magazines, newspapers, 122, 142–143, 145
typography reading, 15–16, 51–52, 55, 61, 64, 78–80,
privacy, private identity, 19, 72, 75, 101, 95, 98–99, 103, 127, 131, 139, 141, 143
118, 121 See also literacy, writing
progress, xiv, 6–7, 35, 37, 56, 62, 64, 75, Reagan, Nancy, 108
107, 131, 137, 138, 141–142, 144 Reagan, Ronald, xi, 23, 103, 106, 107, 109
propaganda, 8, 13, 54, 63–64, 67, 76, 78 reality, 31, 48, 67–68, 72, 93, 102, 118
proposition, propositional symbolic form, See also hyperreality, virtual reality
54, 72 reality television, 88, 101–104, 127
Protestant Reformation, 63 Reddit, 97
Protestantism, 18, 117 relational communication, 31–32, 46–47, 49
See also Christianity, televangelism relationship, 31, 44, 46–47, 49, 54, 55, 57,
pseudo-event, 66, 89, 95 80–81, 88, 118, 126, 129, 133, 138, 142
public, 4, 9, 18, 19, 23, 25, 62, 64, 72, 75, religion, xv, 4, 17–19, 32, 35, 57, 63–64, 75,
78, 86, 90, 94, 99, 107, 108, 111, 121 90, 113–123, 139, 141, 142–144
public discourse, xi, 11–12, 23, 32, 74, 76, See also Christianity, Islam, Judaism,
81, 99 Roman Catholicism, spiritualism
public education, 11, 17, 38, 65 religious programming, 18, 114–117
public intellectual, 33, 42 See also televangelists
public interest, 75 religious studies, 42
public journalism, 99, 142 remedial media, 50, 97
public relations, 66 remediation, 54
public service, 93 Renaissance, 60, 63
public speaking, 7, 16, 18, 32, 49, 55, 89–90, republic of letters, 64
103, 106, 109, 115–116 Rheingold, Howard, 80, 140, 154
publicity, 61, 63, 66 Rice, Tim, 118
Richards, I. A., 22, 152, 154
Riebesell, Jane, 27
Riesman, David, 24
Q Roberts, Oral, 116
Robertson, Pat, 116
Quayle, Dan, 104
robots, 129
quantification, 36, 42, 77–78, 97, 138
Rogers, Everett M., 56, 154
See also number, numeracy
Roman Catholicism, 63
Rome, 3, 60, 63
Romney, Mitt, 104
R Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 19
Rose, Ellen, 81, 154
Radical Software magazine, 27 Rosen, Jay, 99, 154
radio, 16, 18, 31, 45, 50–53, 68, 71, 73, Rushkoff, Douglas, x, 128, 140, 154
119–120, 131 Russell, Bertrand, 22, 156
168 index
Ryan, Paul, 29, 68, 154 simulation, 67, 119, 128–129

See also hyperreality, virtual reality
Sinclair, Upton, 119, 154
S situation, 15, 32, 46, 59–60, 61, 70,
114–115, 119
sacred, 17, 19, 114–115, 118–123, 139, 143 See also context, environment
San Francisco State College, 20–21 Slashdot, 97
Sapir, Edward, 9, 21, 23, 29, 154 Small, Gary, 80, 154
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, 21 Snowden, Edward, 10
Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski-Ames-Einstein- social media, xi, 46, 70–71, 75, 78, 80–81,
Heisenberg-Wittgenstein-McLuhan- 95, 98–99, 111, 117, 121, 127, 129, 136
Et Al. Hypothesis, 23, 29 social science, xiii, 36, 138
satellite communications, xi, 49, 73–74, 93, 116 Sontag, Susan, 67, 73, 154
Schieffer, Bob, 86 sound, 52–53, 54, 68, 114–115, 123
Schiffman, Zachary S., 50, 77, 150 See also acoustics
Schneider, Ira, 27, 156 sound bites, 89, 103, 142
schooling, schools, 11, 17–18, 22–25, sound recording, 52–53, 68
27, 33–34, 37, 51, 61, 63, 65, 122, Southam Interactive, 27, 154
126–133, 143–144 Soviet Union, 9–10, 103
Schudson, Michael, 65, 66, 154 space, 15, 33, 49–50, 52, 59, 62, 88, 90,
Schwartz, Tony, 29, 47, 104, 119, 154 114–115
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 107 See also cyberspace
science, 7, 10, 19, 32, 35, 36, 57, 62, 64, 94, speech, 46, 54, 64, 78, 94
122, 137, 139, 143 See also orality, public speaking
science fiction, 24 speed (of communication, transmission of
scientific management, 75 information), 6, 34, 39, 49–50, 72, 77,
scientism, 78, 143 79, 128
Scorsese, Martin, 118 spiritualism, 119
scribal culture, 46, 54, 59, 60, 62–63, 66, 79 SpongeBob SquarePants, 127
See also handwriting, literacy, reading, sports, 8, 20, 32, 42, 64, 71–72, 88, 95, 115
writing Stalin, Joseph, 9–10
Scrogin, Elizabeth, 27 standardization, 60–61, 63–64
Second Commandment, 113 steam-powered printing, 52, 65–66
secondary orality, 53, 79 Steinberg, S. H., 60, 154
self-consciousness, 55, 116 Sternberg, Janet, x, 19, 21, 32, 81, 154
semantic environment, 23, 32, 34, 114 Stewart, Jon, 96, 140
Sendak, Maurice, 17 story, story-telling, see narrative
Sesame Street, 126 Strate, Lance, xii, 5, 6, 16, 31, 42–47, 49,
Shakespeare, William, 40, 136, 145 55, 57, 70, 78, 90, 138, 151, 153, 154,
Shannon, Claude E., 47, 77, 154 155
Shaw, Bernard, 87, 104 Streisand, Barbra, 17
Silicon Valley, 21 subjectivity, 52, 67
Simon, Neil, 21 Sunrise Semester, 125
Simon, Paul, 113 Supreme Court, 90, 95–96
index 169
survival, 4–5, 24–25, 30, 36–37, 48, Teletubbies, 126

100–102, 123, 133, 136 televangelists, 18, 116–117
Swaggart, Jimmy, 116 television, xi, xiv, 11–13, 16, 19, 22, 31, 33–
swiftboating, 105 37, 41–42, 45, 49–53, 55–56, 58, 59–60,
symbol, symbolic form, symbol system, xiv, 67–68, 71–76, 78, 80, 102–111, 113–120,
7, 10, 21–22, 30, 34, 39, 44, 47–50, 125–128, 131–132, 137, 140, 142
52–54, 57, 59, 71–72, 78, 122, 143–144 television news, 85–99, 103, 110
See also environment, symbolic See also broadcasting, cable television,
symbolic interaction, 31 satellite communications
systems theory, systems view, 4, 26, 31–34, terrorism, 10, 90, 121, 137
43–44, 47–48, 56–57, 135, 141 text, 26, 51, 60–61, 70, 78–79, 91, 99, 111,
See also ecology 120–121, 127, 130–131, 143
text messaging, 102, 115
textbook, 22
T Thaler, Paul, 116, 155
thermostatic mechanism, thermostatic view,
Taft, William, 106 5, 33
talk shows, 88, 96, 103, 106, 108–109, 116 thinking, thought, xiv, 6, 8–9, 21, 26, 30,
Tannen, Deborah, 105, 155 34, 40, 53–55, 57, 61, 67, 79–80, 105,
Taylor, Frederick, 75 120, 127, 133, 136–137, 144–146
Tea Party, 110 Thompson, Fred, 107–108
teaching, 6, 18, 22–23, 26, 30, 33–34, Thoreau, Henry David, 66, 69, 155
46–47, 125–126, 130–133, 143, 146 ticker (news, stock), 91–92
technique, 12, 26, 29, 31, 34, 44, 46–48, 50, time, xi, 4, 7, 9, 15–16, 20, 21, 28, 33,
62, 75, 77, 78, 97, 100, 105, 110–111, 39, 49–50, 59, 62–63, 68, 79, 103,
128, 137, 141 (This is an established 114–115, 129, 131, 133, 137–140
term in the literature, used to distinguish See also future, past, present
procedures from tools and machines) TLC (The Learning Channel), 127
See also means, media, method, technology Toddlers & Tiaras, 127
technocracy, 37, 62, 75, 77, 122 Toffler, Alvin, 4–5, 155
technological determinism, 55–56, 76 tradition, 6–7, 13, 21, 35, 37, 46, 61, 76,
technology (in general), xi–xv, 4–7, 10–13, 101, 113, 116–117, 119, 121–122, 139,
26, 28, 29, 30–31, 34, 36–40, 42, 44, 142–144
45, 47–51, 55–56, 62, 76–78, 88, 111, transportation, 49, 68, 130
122–123, 128, 130–131, 133, 136–145 transportation models of communication, 47
See also means, media, method, technique tribalism, 57–58, 99, 101–102, 120
technology Sabbath, technology Shabbat, 140 Trump, Donald, 102
technology studies, 42, 44 Turkle, Sherry, 80, 129, 155
technopoly, xii, 10, 12, 21, 36–38, 42, 44, Twitter, 71, 98, 115, 127
75–78, 81, 105, 117, 122, 131, 141–143 typography, 16, 35, 46, 53, 59–62, 64–65,
telegraph, 45, 49, 50, 58, 67, 69–72, 77–78, 67, 72, 78, 99, 102–103, 111 118,
91–92, 103, 119, 122, 128 120–122, 126–127, 141, 143
telepathy, 119 See also books, magazines, newspapers,
telephone, 45, 50, 53, 68, 71 102, 115, 119 printing, print media
170 index
U Weizenbaum, Joseph, 138, 155

Whorf, Benjamin L., 9, 21, 23, 29, 155
UFO Files, 127 White, Lynn, Jr., 56, 155
University of Toronto, 20, 44 Whitehead, Alfred North, 22, 24, 156
utopia, 6–7, 11–12, 24, 64–65, 135, 144 Wiener, Norbert, 5, 24, 156
WikiLeaks, 98
Wikipedia, 79, 97
V Williams, Brian, 87
Windows operating system, xiii, 55
Valéry, Paul, 5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 22, 23, 29, 156
Varela, Francisco J., 57, 151 Wohl, Richard, 88, 118, 150
Ventura, Jesse, 107 Wolf, Maryanne, 80, 156
video art, 5, 27, 29, 68, 89 Wood, Donald N., 76, 156
video online, 89, 91, 98, 105, 111, 121, 126, word (as symbolic form), 6, 9, 15–16, 33–34,
128 41–42, 53–54, 61, 67, 71, 78–79, 81,
video recording, videotape, 73, 89–91, 93, 111, 114, 118, 122, 128–129, 133, 139,
98–99, 116, 120, 121, 126 142–143
Vietnam, 20, 86, 105 word processing, 54, 127–128
virtual community, 54, 78 World-Wide Web, xi, 75, 78, 79, 97–99,
virtual presence, 72 111, 116, 136
virtual reality, 53, 128 See also websites
visualism, 53, 61–62, 65, 68 World Wrestling Entertainment, World
voice, 55, 71, 87, 114, 123 Wrestling Federation, 95
voice messages, 115 writing, writing systems, xii, 6–7, 15–16,
voice recognition, voice synthesis, 128 19, 40, 42, 44, 46, 50–52, 54–55,
volume of information, 50–51, 60, 71, 75 58–59, 61–62, 70, 77–80, 87–88, 120,
Vorgan, Gigi, 80, 154 127, 131
See also handwriting, literacy, reading,
scribal culture
W Wurtzel, Elizabeth, 12, 156
Wall Street Journal, xiii, 99

Watergate, 72, 86, 106, 108 Y
Waters, Roger, xiii, 38
Watson, Wilfred, 102, 151 Yalkut, Jud, 27, 156
Watzlawick, Paul, 31–32, 46–47, 53, 155 YoGabbaGabba, 126
Weakland, John H., 31, 155 Youngman, Henny, 17
Weaver, Warren, 47, 154 YouTube, see video online
Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 118
websites, 70, 79, 90, 97–99, 115, 117, 121
See also World-Wide Web Z
Weingartner, Charles, xii, 4, 6, 20, 22–23,
25, 29–30, 32–33, 35, 154 zombie apocalypse, 7
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You may gather, from this comment, that my approach is sympathetic to

makes us human, as he readily acknowledges. The problem, instead, is

Sometime about the middle of 1963, my colleague Charles Weingartner and

novelty and innovation (Goody, 1977; Havelock, 1963, 1986; McLuhan,

of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on

As a thought experiment, Newspeak represents a practical (albeit highly

We can be grateful, at least, that the celebration and self-congratulation that

And in the concluding chapter of Amusing Ourselves to Death, aptly entitled

It is not unusual for readers to gain an inaccurate impression of what an au-

appearance of being knowledgeable about a subject without actually having

Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that he developed an

There was no question of Neil Postman’s Jewish identity for those of us

Although he was critical of religious zealotry and extremism, Postman’s up-

Take religion more seriously than you have.

form of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell (1925–1927), Ernst

how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and

replaced the professor-dominated, text-oriented norm with an inquiring learning

Perhaps most telling of all, she says of Postman,

Postman’s disregard for many forms of academic status perhaps helps to

As it turns out, the Understanding McLuhan CD-ROM had a fully searchable

our symbols, codes, and languages, constitute an environment that influences

and Roderick D. McKenzie, leading in turn to references to social ecology

Postman’s context analysis incorporated the symbolic interactionist approach

provide instruction in understanding language, symbolic form, and media; he

Media ecology is the study of information environments. It is concerned to under-

Following the publication of Teaching as a Conserving Activity, Postman be-

provided Postman’s most comprehensive contrast between the age of typog-

The lead essay in Conscientious Objections (1988), “Social Science as Mor-

Postman’s emphasis shifted from specific technologies such as television, to

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean

The unpredictable and harmful effects of new technologies are exacerbated

1. All technological change is a Faustian bargain. For every advantage a

4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It com-

In 1999, as a response to President Clinton’s rhetorical call to build a bridge to

1. “What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?” (p. 42).

efforts to continue to solve the problem led to information overload. Postman

if an academic has anything interesting or useful to say, I believe he or she has a

Postman’s criticisms were often accompanied by his distinctive brand of hu-

Ghost (Nystrom, 1997).

As I have noted, Postman was a bit of a trickster. Andrew Postman (2005)

political science, economics, psychology, computer and information science,

colleagues (Watzlawick, Bavelas, & Jackson, 1967) distinguish between the

key characteristic. McLuhan (1964) emphasized the overwhelming impact of

inevitably introduce new technological problems, which require still more

Conditions of attendance constitute another key characteristic of media.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman draws a sharp contrast between the

situation. In drawing the specific contrast between typography and television,

agents performing dramatic actions, to satisfy its mnemonic requirements.

immediate past into a period of enhanced significance; as Eisenstein explains,

meant by simulation and hyperreality: a manufactured representation of the

Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) can be understood as an extended

Telegraphic discourse is incoherent in its breakdown of linearity and its

The relative stability of the television-dominated media environment of the