Revisiting the prophetic work of Neil Postman about the media » MercatorNet - 1 views
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shared by Javier E on 13 May 21
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The NYU professor was surely prophetic. “Our own tribe is undergoing a vast and trembling shift from the magic of writing to the magic of electronics,” he cautioned.
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“We face the rapid dissolution of the assumptions of an education organised around the slow-moving printed word, and the equally rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic message.”
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What Postman perceived in television has been dramatically intensified by smartphones and social media
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Today corporations like Google and Amazon collect data on Internet users based on their browsing history, the things they purchase, and the apps they use
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Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us,
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“Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organisations, but have solved very little of importance to most people, and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”
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“Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”
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As a student of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman believed that the medium of information was critical to understanding its social and political effects. Every technology has its own agenda. Postman worried that the very nature of television undermined American democratic institutions.
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“When, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” warned Postman.
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As for new problems, we have increased addictions (technological and pornographic); increased loneliness, anxiety, and distraction; and inhibited social and intellectual maturation.
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The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.
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This is far truer of the Internet and social media, where more than a third of Americans, and almost half of young people, now get their news.
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with smartphones now ubiquitous, the Internet has replaced television as the “background radiation of the social and intellectual universe.”
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Reading news or commentary in print, in contrast, requires concentration, patience, and careful reflection, virtues that our digital age vitiates.
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“How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged,” observed Postman. In the case of politics, television fashions public discourse into yet another form of entertainment
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In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. … They tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them.
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The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
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Such is the case with the way politics is “advertised” to different subsets of the American electorate. The “consumer,” depending on his political leanings, may be manipulated by fears of either an impending white-nationalist, fascist dictatorship, or a radical, woke socialist takeover.
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This paradigm is aggravated by the hypersiloing of media content, which explains why Americans who read left-leaning media view the Proud Boys as a legitimate, existential threat to national civil order, while those who read right-leaning media believe the real immediate enemies of our nation are Antifa
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Regardless of whether either of these groups represents a real public menace, the loss of any national consensus over what constitutes objective news means that Americans effectively talk past one another: they use the Proud Boys or Antifa as rhetorical barbs to smear their ideological opponents as extremists.
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Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are, rather, “equipped with a program for social change.
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Postman’s analysis of technology is prophetic and profound. He warned of the trivialising of our media, defined by “broken time and broken attention,” in which “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” He warned of “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity.”
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Postman’s suggestions regarding education are certainly relevant. He unequivocally condemned education that mimics entertainment, and urged a return to learning that is hierarchical, meaning that it first gives students a foundation of essential knowledge before teaching “critical thinking.”
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Postman also argued that education must avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach in favor of complexity and the perplexing: the latter method elicits in the student a desire to make sense of what perplexes him.
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Finally, Postman promoted education of vigorous exposition, logic, and rhetoric, all being necessary for citizenship
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Another course of action is to understand what these media, by their very nature, do to us and to public discourse.
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We must, as Postman exhorts us, “demystify the data” and dominate our technology, lest it dominate us. We must identify and resist how television, social media, and smartphones manipulate our emotions, infantilise us, and weaken our ability to rebuild what 2020 has ravaged.