All The Things You Never Even Knew You Wanted To Know About Neil Postman - NeilPostman.org - 0 views
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here are some Big Ideas that have stuck out to me:
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The medium is the message. Borrowing from McLuhan, he explained that every medium — TV, radio, typography, oral transmission — changes and biases the message itself
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The written word, for example, tends to bias the message towards linear thinking, logic, exposition, and delayed response.
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Video tends to bias towards the “peek-a-book world”: trivial content that vanishes in seconds, constantly flickering images, yet the viewer has a hard time turning away no matter the subject… because the medium is just so darn entertaining
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School is about asking questions; TV is about passive consumption. School is about the development of language; TV demands attention to images.
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by equating education with entertainment children would never learn the rigorous of serious schooling.
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Subjects should be taught as history. “Every teacher,” Postman said, “must be a history teacher.” Every subject has a fascinating history.
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To teach a subject without the history of how it happened “is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product,” he said. “It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know.
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To teach about the atom without Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots
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Fear Huxley’s future, not Orwell’s. Everyone is worried about Big Brother… but we should really fear ourselves. We live in a society where we can spend hours on devices entertaining ourselves.
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How we talk is how we think. “Any significant change in our ways of talking can lead to a change in point of view.”
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The words we use convey meaning and if you can convince others to use your words, perspectives can shift.
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The printing press allowed us to codify and pass down knowledge reliability but in exchange we gave up our memories.
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We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
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But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
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But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
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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.
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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
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Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
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As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.
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In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
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In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.