I’m part way through this, will pick it up and finish it in a bit [published in Salon, seems related]:
“Meet the man who predicted Fox News, the Internet, Stephen Colbert and reality TV”
“......Perhaps most central to all of [Neil] Postman’s work was the notion, which he shared with McLuhan, that technology is not neutral. “As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it,” he wrote. “Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.” Even more basically, he was concerned not just how we used our tools – gunpowder, the clock, the printing press, the television, the computer – but how our tools use us. And unlike theorists who took a detached, on-one-hand/on-the-other hand view of media, Postman made clear where his values were: “Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them.”
Unlike McLuhan, who wrote in a dense, aphoristic style, embedded imagery from advertising in his texts and sometimes turned his pages into visual elements in themselves – or like contemporary communications scholars, whose work is often built on impenetrable theoretical language — Postman was a straightforward and eminently lucid writer in the tradition of Orwell.
In the ‘80s – as network news was dominant, MTV ubiquitous, and a Hollywood actor sat in the White House – the image seemed to Postman to be displacing print, a huge shift from the world Gutenberg made. It was, in a phrase he would use later, a collision of worldviews. The result of his inquiry was “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” (The writer Steve Almond recently quoted from the book to show that Postman had predicted Stephen Colbert: “the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities, would star in movies, and would end up making television commercials.”)
The book’s foreword made one of his most famous arguments – that it’s Huxley, and not Orwell, who best foresaw contemporary America:
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 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.
Postman, of course, was not the first thinker to look at the effects of visual culture on politics. Historian Daniel Boorstin described the process in his 1961 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America” and several ’60s journalists looked at how television shaped the Kennedy and Nixon races.
To Bai, though, “Amusing Ourselves” became “a kind of North Star” for his inquiry into how political coverage shifted away from ideology and issues and toward personality and scandal. (Near the end of “All the Truth Is Out,” Bai calls the Postman book “a brilliant, enduring work, and anyone who cares about the state of our public discourse should read it.”) Part of what struck Bai was Postman’s contrasting of political debate in the Age of Print – the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for instance – and what we get in the Age of the Image. “I was very struck,” Bai says, “by his idea that it’s very much about the technology we have at our disposal.”.....”
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.
That was profoundly accurate.
Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living.
He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later to become George Orwell) and Steven Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn't keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words. For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at the Air Ministry.
Paddy Chayefsky was 10 years ahead of Postman. He portrayed the act of criticism itself being co-opted by television, with the character of Howard Beale in Network. The Howard Beale Show also foreshadowed the daytime freak shows so common today.
Huxley was right.