Postman was a excellent critic/analyst, even if he was on the left. I recall his mockery of newscasters who would report on some great human catastrophe, e.g. 60,000 people killed in a tsunami, and then intoning “Now...this” to break to a wacky commercial for corn chips. In response to one of Clinton-Gore’s 1996 campaign catchphrases, he wrote that he wanted to “build a bridge to the 18th century”, i.e. restore a sense of Enlightenment rationality and literacy to public discourse.
It’s sad that there is no media critic of Postman’s caliber alive today.
Thanks for the insights.
I just finished the piece. The wrap up:
“.....Read almost three decades later, Postman represents the boatman he described. It’s worth noting, though, that his work is largely ignored in academia. Scholars of communications and media theory are often, though not always, enthusiastic about technological change; many of them team up against copyright protection and in favor of the cult of “free.” Since they don’t typically earn their living from their writing or music, it’s easy for them to cheerlead for piracy and digital “innovation” that leaves artists uncompensated. (There may be other reasons, too: A communications scholar once told me that her colleagues downgraded Postman’s work because it could be read by the layman.)
“His work was almost too prescient,” says Matt Bai. “Now it seems almost like a given, like it’s obvious. How rare that insight is in academic or cultural criticism!”
But as valuable as he’s been to his work, Postman’s name does not often come up inside the Beltway. “My chief criticism about the new generation of political journalism and media,” says Bai, who writes for Yahoo News, “is that they don’t have a broader curiosity about the world. They have to file 12 times a day; they don’t read novels, they don’t read history. So I think Postman has been a bit of a victim of the culture he foreshadowed. The technology is so dominant – for a lot of people, especially younger Americans, it’s year zero. What’s the point of knowing what happened in 1980? It’s ancient. But it’s hard to get a sense of what’s lost until you know what was.”
Jaron Lanier, who works in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, across the continent and several cultural divides from Bai’s Washington, gives an eerily similar assessment of Postman’s place in his world. “If you feel like all information is available, you know less and your thinking becomes narrower,” he says. “The tech world is fairly history free, so nobody comes up. The mystery remains how to get anyone interested in history at all. In a way, Silicon Valley thinks there’s only the present, and the present’s ideas about the future. Whoever’s alive now knows best.”
Oddly, he says, “It’s easier to get information than ever before, but people are much less informed.” Lanier thinks we’re still catching up to his work. “I think Postman’s day,” he said, “might not have come yet.” [end]